I daresay that more than 80% of the population do not psychologically trust and prefer not to depend on virtual technologies or commodities because they simply view “computers” as an entertainment tool. Of course that is changing at a rapid speed but the ridiculously poor education and the heavily class-separated culture is a big obstacle to overcome.

Egypt’s society is close to a tribal model where an average actively social 21-25 years old person could easily have close friends that span 2-3 states and know most if not all the people in her neighborhood. And since peer effect/pressure is the dominating social model due to cultural “attitudes”, word-of-mouth is the key to success and also the key to a dramatic failure, even a slightly elaborated rumor can do significant damages in a very short period of time — which is also partially related to poor education.

Given all of the above, let’s add the fact that working-at-your-own-startup in Egypt often translates to “unemployed” which when mixed with the peer effects social model creates a stressful atmosphere where success is quite limited to the courageous few that are born to go against the “current” which choose to sacrifice a lot of “social” — which is a big deal to families and that’s a problem because most don’t leave their parents’ homes till they get married!

Now culture and psychology aside, corruption is not only in key leaders in the government, corruption in Egypt has grown roots and became so stable that even some make a living on corruption only, that if they depended on their futile salaries they won’t be able to survive a week in the current market where everything is getting more expensive by the minute due to the greedy cartels dominating almost every sector and industry that were frankly cultivated by policy makers as long as their pockets are kept fat, and this is not only on a large scale, a few small time shops near to each other will often make their own completely unregulated cartels as well.

To add an insult to injury, and back again to culture, there’s this preference towards buying anything that has a sticker on it that says “Made in ” where X is any one country but not Egypt due to the majority of products made locally being of a poor quality and high price — due to importing raw material from other countries at a low volume — for the better part of the century. Egypt’s sociopolitical scene is a complete disaster.

Economically speaking and in my humble opinion: Egypt will need a true cultural revolution before it goes anywhere near a friendly startup environment, and it did in fact start earlier in 2011, sadly it didn’t focus on culture and has been entirely eradicated by the radical Islamists — of whom a member requested the banning of English studies in schools as it is a conspiracy by the “west” to destroy Islam’s identity — which the majority of the population take whatever they say as the unquestionable wisdom to ultimate salvation.