Egypt-Based Circular Economy Platform Dawar Bags Nine-Digit Financing Facility To Scale Recyclable Material Trade

Egypt-based circular economy platform Dawar Circular Solutions has secured a nine-digit financing facility from several Egyptian financial institutions, including the non-banking financial services provider GlobalCorp, factoring and supply chain finance company Tawasoa, and private sector banking group Commercial International Bank (CIB), which will be used to finance the trade of recyclable materials moving through Dawar's traceability-enabled network.

Founded by Amr Fathi, Mostafa Khairat, and Hussein Barrada in Egypt in 2017, Dawar operates a digital infrastructure platform for recyclable material flows, having recorded more than 90,000 verified tons of materials across 22 governorates across the country. By tracking and verifying the movement of recyclables across collection points, aggregators, and traders, the company helps formalize fragmented waste recovery systems and transform them into traceable, audit-ready supply chains. This enables recyclable materials to meet evolving regulatory requirements, access international markets, and qualify for financing—an increasingly important capability for exporters in Egypt and the GCC, as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) compliance standards now extend beyond product quality to include proof of material-level traceability. 

The facility will be used to finance the trade of recyclable materials moving through Dawar's network, while the company's technology platform provides the traceability infrastructure that enables those material flows to be documented, verified, and financed. By generating verifiable data on material origin, handling, and processing, the platform helps address longstanding information gaps across waste supply chains in Egypt and the wider region. Dawar is also working to establish a scalable framework for material verification as regulators and market participants place increasing emphasis on transparency and accountability. The transaction underscores growing institutional interest in a sector that has historically remained difficult to formalize and finance despite its scale and economic potential. According to Mostafa Afify, Head of Investment at Dawar, the company's ability to bring structure and accountability to waste recovery operations played a central role in attracting support from major financial institutions.

"Egypt's waste industry represents one of the largest and most underserved market opportunities in the region, which is significant in scale, yet historically resistant to formalization," Afify told Inc. Arabia. "The core challenge has never been the market's size or its economic potential, but rather the absence of documentation and institutional infrastructure needed to make daily trading transparent and regulated. For decades, penetrating this market meant navigating informal, often unethical practices; a reality that kept institutional capital on the sidelines. What Dawar brought to the table was a solution that changed that calculus entirely. By building visibility into the operational process and closing the governance gaps that had long made the sector opaque, Dawar gave financial institutions like GlobalCorp, Tawasoa, and Commercial International Bank something the waste industry had never offered before: a credible, structured entry point into a market that had previously been inaccessible at scale. For institutional backers, the confidence didn't come from the market opportunity alone; it came from seeing that Dawar had built the infrastructure to unlock it responsibly."

The financing comes as international regulations and sustainability frameworks, including digital product passports and extended producer responsibility schemes, increasingly require continuous and verifiable data collection rather than periodic reporting. Buyers are also demanding stronger proof of origin, chain-of-custody documentation, and evidence of processing integrity for recycled materials. As traceability becomes an increasingly important requirement for market access, financing, and compliance, Dawar sees it as a core building block of the evolving waste economy and a driver of broader value creation across the sector. Discussing the broader implications of that shift, Fathi, co-founder and CEO of Dawar, said, "Traceability is far more than an operational improvement; it is the foundational layer upon which an entirely new economic architecture for waste can be built. At the community level, it begins with the people who have always been closest to the waste stream: informal workers. Digitizing and documenting their activity increases their income, gives them a sense of ownership over what they collect, and progressively transforms them from day laborers into micro-entrepreneurs. The knock-on effect impacting surrounding communities, in livelihoods, stability, and social mobility, is substantial.”

Beyond its influence on collection networks and local economic participation, the ability to trace waste streams is also changing how public and private stakeholders engage with the sector. “For governments, traceability converts a black-box market into a legible one," Fathi noted. "Authorities gain visibility into trade flows, logistics pricing, and the scale of potential tax leakage, data that has simply never existed before. That visibility in and of itself represents a significant asset that helps shape policy and drive fiscal value. For local recyclers, traceability unlocks access to ESG marketplaces that were previously out of reach. Digitization creates verified, ethical, and resilient supply chains—the kind of provenance that brand owners and global buyers increasingly demand as regulatory pressure mounts. Once that data exists, it cascades upward: brand owners purchasing recyclates can confidently track and substantiate their environmental impact, meeting ESG compliance targets that were historically impossible to back with hard evidence."

Beyond the immediate benefits for regulators, recyclers, and brand owners, Fathi believes that developing a traceability layer could extend into entirely new market structures for recovered materials. “At the macro level, the implications are even more far-reaching," he said. "Today, there is no global benchmark for recycled waste; supply chains are opaque, pricing is inconsistent, and comparability across markets barely exists. But as global recycling targets tighten and demand for verified waste materials grows, that will fundamentally change. Waste will become commoditized, and traceability is the key to standardizing how that material is traded globally, laying the groundwork for indices, derivative markets, and institutional financial participation as the market matures. The markets that build this infrastructure first will not just be ready for that future; they will define it."

With its domestic network continuing to expand, Dawar is also evaluating opportunities beyond Egypt, targeting markets where similar structural challenges persist and where traceability infrastructure could accelerate the formalization of waste value chains. Discussing the company's regional ambitions, Afify said, "Regional expansion is very much on the horizon, and our focus is directed toward West and East African markets. Structurally, these regions share many of the defining characteristics that shaped Egypt's waste ecosystem before Dawar: large, active informal waste sectors, limited institutional infrastructure, and significant economic value locked within unregulated supply chains. In many of these markets, the conditions are not just present; they are arguably more acute than they were in Egypt at our earliest stage, which speaks to both the urgency and the scale of the opportunity. Our expansion strategy is built on the same foundational logic that drove our success in Egypt: enter markets where the informal ecosystem is already active and established, build the traceability and governance layer on top of existing community networks, and create the documented financial framework that makes the sector legible to institutional capital. The sequencing will be guided by regulatory openness, ecosystem maturity, and the depth of existing informal recycling infrastructure; all factors we have spent years learning to navigate efficiently."

For entrepreneurs looking to build businesses in climate infrastructure and circular economy sectors, Fathi noted that some of the biggest opportunities are emerging from industries that have historically received limited attention from innovators and investors. "For founders entering the climate infrastructure or circular economy space today, the advice is simple: do not confuse visibility with opportunity," he said. "Some of the most important sectors are also the least glamorous. Waste, recycling, and industrial infrastructure are rarely seen as attractive starting points for innovation, yet they contain some of the largest unsolved operational and economic challenges in emerging markets. Dawar is, in many ways, proof that impact and commercial viability are not opposing forces. When approached with enough discipline and long-term conviction, they reinforce one another. Over the last nine years, we have built within fragmented supply chains, informal systems, regulatory uncertainty, and markets that many considered too difficult to formalize at scale. But those same inefficiencies created the opportunity. The less attention a sector receives, the greater the potential for meaningful value creation when real infrastructure is introduced." 

Meanwhile, offering a perspective from the investment side of the business, Afify also pointed to the advantages of tackling sectors that others have overlooked. “One of the biggest advantages for founders is building in sectors others have overlooked for years," he said. "We entered a space with little innovation, largely accepted as an ‘as-is’ system, yet beneath that was a major untapped opportunity for value creation. Formalizing waste was never the easy path, but that is precisely what made it worth building in. Some of the strongest businesses emerge where complexity has discouraged others from rethinking the model. Do not be afraid to challenge systems people assume are fixed. Some of the best opportunities come from applying first-principles thinking to industries that have operated the same way for decades, and finding better ways to create value within them."

Similarly, Fathi emphasized that long-term success in circular economy markets depends on adapting to local realities rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. “Every market operates differently," he pointed out. "Materials, regulations, infrastructure maturity, consumer behavior, and industry awareness all shape how solutions are adopted and scaled. That is what makes this space so dynamic, but it also means there is no universal playbook. The founders who succeed are the ones who stay close to the realities of the markets they are building for, and evolve alongside them and bridge the gaps between stakeholders. In sectors as nuanced and fast-evolving as circularity, adaptability is not just a strength. It is part of building a business that lasts."

Pictured in the lead image are Dawar CEO Amr Fathi (left) and Head of Investment Mostafa Afifi (right). Image courtesy Dawar.