Assessment of Externally Funded Decentralization and Local Governance Initiatives in Egypt

In recent years, the Government of Egypt worked closely with various international development institutions, including USAID through the Egyptian Decentralization Initiative (EDI), to promote experimentation with decentralization and local governance reform in the highly centralized country. Prior to the 2011 revolution, the Ministry of State for Local Development (MoLD) was working on a national decentralization and local governance strategy and various pilot programs. The country is now in the process of electing a new government and developing a new constitution, and the place of decentralization is not yet clear. The Capstone team provided inputs to assist EDI in thinking about how to support development of a new strategy paper that is consistent with the evolving situation. Topics of investigation included documenting how key government activities have been handled in the past; providing examples from international experience; outlining essential questions and methodologies for assessing how the system might be transformed going forward; and determining whether/which international agencies might support MoLD to advance their agenda.