More than 100 Egyptian faculties and institutes now offer academic programmes in computer science and artificial intelligence, according to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research — one of the largest AI teaching footprints on the continent.
Ministry spokesperson Adel Abdel Ghaffar said universities are developing comprehensive strategies to apply AI across education, scientific research and innovation, and that the ministry is expanding computer science and AI programmes across all higher education tracks.
Egypt’s higher education system will take in more than four million students this academic year across 131 universities and 185 institutes.
Beyond the classroom
The strategy extends past coursework into practical training, delivered with companies and international institutions — including programmes run with the United Nations Development Programme and the Mohammed bin Rashid Foundation.
Abdel Ghaffar said training will be a priority for the coming year, through university development centres and programmes designed to align student skills with labour-market requirements.
Minister Abdel Aziz Konsowa’s directives cover institutional development alongside the academic programme.
Against the targets
Egypt’s second National AI Strategy 2025-2030 targets 30,000 trained AI specialists, more than 250 AI companies and an ICT contribution to GDP of 7.7% by the end of the decade.
A hundred-plus faculties is the supply side of that. What the ministry has not published is enrolment in those programmes, graduation numbers, or how many of the four million students are studying AI or computer science — the figures that would show whether the footprint is producing specialists at the rate the strategy requires.
Egypt produces more than 750,000 university graduates annually, and the number receiving digital skills training rose from about 4,000 in FY2018/19 to 500,000 in FY2024/25.
The layer above, and the layer below
The university programmes sit between two other pieces of Egypt’s AI education architecture.
Below them, the ministry launched a nationally contextualised AI competency framework for schoolteachers with UNESCO in July — built on the principle that educator capability is the precondition for classroom AI rather than a complement to it. Whether university faculty teaching the 100-plus programmes have equivalent support has not been addressed.
Alongside them, corporate training commitments have arrived at a scale that dwarfs the formal system. Intel signed an agreement this month to train one million Egyptians a year for three years. IBM committed to 100,000 over five years, Microsoft to a matching figure, Oracle to 150,000, and Huawei partnered with three universities to reach 25,000 students.
Those programmes build AI literacy. The universities are meant to produce specialists. Both are needed, and only one currently publishes numbers.
