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Botswana gears up to diversify its economy by moving from mining minerals to mining knowledge.

A historic place on the Silk Road and full state support gives Azerbaijan an e-commerce boost as delegates to the first Baku E-Trade Forum found out.

By developing a national strategy with UNCTAD expertise and private sector support, Egypt’s government plans to harness online opportunities.

Since 2015, Egypt’s government has worked with UNCTAD to boost e-commerce in the Arab-speaking world's most populous market, where most business is still done offline.

Egypt should leverage the strengths of its ICT sector – including its skilled workforce and competitiveness as a regional centre for business process outsourcing - to position itself for strong e-commerce growth

Just one in 10 small handicraft businesses in Egypt currently use the Internet and even fewer sell their products online. These are some of the findings of a new survey conducted by UNCTAD and Egypt's government as part of the development of a National E-commerce Strategy for Egypt.

Egypt is making headway in growing the rate of credit and debit card penetration and galvanizing mobile payments for e-commerce, but bottlenecks remain. Addressing these bottlenecks was the focus of a recent UNCTAD/World Bank fact-finding mission to assess the status of payments for e-commerce in the country.

At the request of Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and with the support from MasterCard, UNCTAD launched an ICT Policy Review to assist Egypt in developing its national e-commerce strategy.

In an increasingly inter-connected world economy, government policies which effectively leverage information and communications technologies (ICTs) to promote economic growth and socioeconomic benefits are crucial. However, designing and implementing such policies can be a challenge for many developing countries.​