A Daring Enterprise tells the story of the Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund (EAEF) from the perspective of its founder, Harmon, who established it in 2011. Harmon is a longtime New York investment banker and former chairman of the Export-Import Bank, a U.S. government agency. The fund, capitalized with $300 million from U.S. taxpayers, claims to have attracted $1.7 billion in foreign investment in 148 companies, supporting 58,000 jobs. Harmon is proud of the prominent role that Egyptians, led by investment banker Ashraf Zaki, played in its management. Zaki had been recommended to him by Egypt’s richest man, Nasser Sawiris, whom Harmon accurately calls the Warren Buffett of Egypt.
The concept of an enterprise fund was championed by President George H. W. Bush in Eastern Europe in 1989 to ease the transition from communist rule. In some places, such as Poland, the fund was quite successful; in others, such as Uzbekistan, it was a failure, having been subject to mismanagement and fraud. Across the region, the program had largely been abandoned by 2010.
The EAEF started in a poisonous atmosphere, with the Egyptian government convinced that Washington had nefarious purposes in funding nongovernmental organizations that Cairo had disapproved of. At the same time, Egypt faced dire economic circumstances as political crises followed one another in short order: widespread protests, Mubarak’s fall, the election of a Muslim Brotherhood government, and a military coup. Washington—both the Obama administration and Congress—was highly skeptical about the enterprise fund, especially given its considerable autonomy from the large aid bureaucracy, which had a proprietary claim on any assistance program.
The fund first proposed acquiring a bank, but that deal ran into the brick wall of Egyptian government opposition to loosening its control over the economy. The fund pivoted to buying a majority stake in the Fawry electronic payments platform, which has been both highly profitable and a great boon to Egyptian consumers. After some ups and downs, its market capitalization reached $1.3 billion in 2026 (after the publication of A Daring Enterprise).
The EAEF benefited from the IMF-promoted economic reforms of 2016, including a 50 percent devaluation. Those reforms greatly encouraged Egyptian entrepreneurs to start new firms. Harmon gives a blow-by-blow account of the fund’s involvement with several of them. He describes the challenges of accustoming Egyptians to private investment funds. Additionally, he acknowledges, albeit without much detail, the important role that Sawiris had played in facilitating the trade in shares of firms in which the fund had invested.
The authors—Harmon, aided by Queen and Warren—are justifiably proud that the second Trump administration has green-lighted the continued operation of the EAEF. They offer an over-the-top defense of the fund as embodying U.S. values and advancing its interests. A fairer evaluation would present the fund as a small but positive step, one that would be difficult to scale up and that should be phased out over time as Egyptians become increasingly accustomed to private investment funds. One hopes that the EAEF does not follow in the long line of U.S. government-run programs that began with a reasonable purpose but then perpetuated themselves long after that purpose had become outdated.
Patrick Clawson
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C.
