Cairo — Egypt is sharpening its push into the global offshoring market, placing digital freelancers at the center of a broader strategy to scale cross-border digital services and expand export-driven growth, as competition for digital talent intensifies worldwide.

Mahmoud Sofrata, Vice President for Market Development at the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), said structural shifts in the global labor market are accelerating the rise of freelance work, transforming it from a secondary employment option into a core pillar of the digital economy.

“The expansion of freelancing is contributing directly to digital exports and strengthening Egypt’s integration into global services markets,” Sofrata said.

Speaking at WorkShift Summit 2026 on behalf of ITIDA Chief Executive Ahmed Elzaher, he noted that Egypt has made measurable progress, and ranked 9th globally in freelancing, according to the World Bank, with an estimated 850,000 digital freelancers. This momentum is powered by a massive human capital pipeline; Egypt graduates nearly 750,000 university students annually, including around 50,000 engineers. This creates one of the largest technical talent pools in the EMEA region — multilingual, cost-competitive, and increasingly specialized in digital technologies.

However, Sofrata stressed that Egypt remains at an early stage in fully capturing the opportunity, as global demand for digital skills continues to accelerate and competition among offshoring destinations intensifies.

He described freelancing, particularly in the technology sector, as a human-capital-driven industry, where competitiveness depends not only on technical capabilities but also on pricing, communication and client management in a highly competitive global environment.

ITIDA has been expanding its talent development pipeline through targeted training programs, alongside initiatives such as Egypt FWD and ITIDA Gigs, aimed at equipping freelancers with the skills needed to compete internationally and access global demand.

ITIDA is also preparing new incentive packages for digital freelancers to enhance their global competitiveness and increase their contribution to digital exports, as part of a broader push to position Egypt as a hub for IT offshoring and digital services.

This talent surge directly fuels Egypt’s broader macroeconomic targets, anchoring a sector that already accounts for over 6% of the country’s GDP. This growing freelance momentum underpins Egypt’s trajectory from achieving $5.2 billion in digital services offshoring revenues in 2025 to securing its 2026 target of $6 billion, leveraging a distributed network of remote professionals as a collective engine for national growth.

WorkShift Summit 2026 brings together government entities and industry stakeholders, including the ministries of communications, labor and investment, reflecting wider efforts to scale digital employment and advance a knowledge-based economy.

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