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Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves reach $44.46bn in September

October 8, 2018 at 11:05 pm

Egypt’s net foreign reserves rose by $40 million by the end of last September, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) announced yesterday.

The CBE said that the country’s net foreign reserves rose to $44.459 billion at the end of September 2018, compared to $44.419 billion at the end of July.

The bank did not provide details about the source of an increase in the country’s foreign reserves, which it said was equivalent to a monthly rise of 0.09 percent.

The increase in foreign reserves, CBE noted, coincides with the rise in the country’s external debt, which reached $92.64 billion at the end of last June.

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In September 2017, Egypt’s net foreign reserves stood at $36.535 billion.

Since the start of the President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s first tenure in May 2014, Egypt has embarked on a multi-sectoral nation-wide reform programme in an attempt to revive an economy that battered by political upheaval after the 2011 revolution and to ease a US dollar shortage that has crippled import activity and hampered recovery. The government has been negotiating billions of dollars in aid from various international leaders.

The Egyptian government announced last month that it had received the last $500 million tranche of a three-year $1.5 billion loan from the African Development Bank (AfDB).

In November 2015, Egypt won a three-year $12 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, which aimed at reviving the country’s struggling economy, bringing down public debt and controlling inflation while seeking to protect the poor.