This blog is the third in a four-part series focused on eco-industrial parks – communities of businesses working together to enhance their combined environmental, economic and social performance. The series offers insights from related GIZ and UNIDO projects that support the uptake of materials efficiency practices to promote cleaner production and climate-resilient business infrastructures.
Eco-industrial parks, or sustainable industrial areas, not only seek to achieve enhanced environmental, economic and social performance for businesses, but they also help improve competitiveness for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), reduce their production costs, allow business expansion to new markets and widen their customer base.
A sustainable industrial area guarantees an enabling environment that provides companies, especially SMEs, with demand-based services, and plays an important role in promoting materials efficiency as well as cleaner production methods, through industrial symbiosis and waste management practices amongst others. This in turn helps reduce the carbon footprint of their products.
Developing sustainable industrial areas in Egypt
Egypt is increasingly recognizing the importance of sustainable industrial areas given the benefits associated with them and the increasing demands of international investors. Since 2018, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH has been providing technical assistance to industrial areas in Egypt to this end.
In March 2018, GIZ organized the International Conference on Sustainable Industrial Areas (SIA) in Cairo, which included more than 350 participants from companies, industrial parks, industry associations, industrial development agencies, financial institutions, government institutions and international donor agencies, as well as consultants and experts from all over the world. The conference offered an opportunity to discuss recent trends, best practices and future development of sustainable industrial areas, and addressed investment promotion, SME development and how to generate productive employment.
Implementing the International Framework for Eco-Industrial Parks was considered one of the first steps to unleash the potential of this growing global trend of adopting sustainability standards of industrial zones. GIZ has developed partnerships with the Industrial Development Authority (IDA), as a public developer, and the Industrial Development Group (IDG), as a private developer, to transform three pilot zones into eco-industrial parks in the 6th of October city near Cairo, Qift in Upper Egypt and Port Said next to the Suez Canal.
GIZ’s supports SMEs to transform industrial areas
The GIZ project Promotion of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises has assisted a number of Egyptian public and private developers by providing training to park management and others on the eco-industrial park concept. The training was followed by several workshops with park management and tenant firms to understand the current situation in the industrial parks. GIZ also conducted a situational analysis of the environmental, economic, social and management aspects. Based on the findings of the gap assessments, recommended interventions were put forward in alignment with the prerequisites and performance indicators outlined in the International Framework for Eco-Industrial Parks.
Based on the gap assessments, a five-year roadmap was developed during 2019-2020 for the three pilot zones to serve as a guideline for park operators on how to achieve the respective pre-requisites and performance indicators, which are not yet fully achieved. For instance, one of the supported private developers started to study the feasibility of implementing solar street lightening and enhancing the waste management system in the park.
The roadmap was developed using a multilevel approach covering the following levels:
The identified measures outlined in the transformational roadmap include:
Surveys have been carried out by the park operators to understand investor feedback on the services provided as well as on any additional services which customers need. As the eco-industrial park concept is based on cooperation between park management and investors, a first meeting of the Park Committee was convened to introduce the transformation process and ensure the commitment of the investors and to appeal for their engagement. Task force teams from different departments to implement the measures of the roadmap through the development of a set of action plans and distributing the roles and responsibilities among the team have been formed as well as the establishment of a quality management system has been started.
Vision of the future
As part of GIZ’s project, the Industrial Area Management team decided to resume supporting public and private developers in at least four pilot zones during 2020 – 2021 in different parts of Egypt to establish sustainable industrial areas. The goal is to make the parks attractive to investors, which in turn will lead to further growth and business development. There is great potential in Egypt to transform existing industrial parks into sustainable industrial areas. This is in line with the government’s economic development goals and its Vision 2030, which promotes sustainability in all aspects.
This blog series has been commissioned by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit / German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ) under the International Climate Initiative (IKI) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the GGKP or its Partners.