North Cairo Electricity Distribution Company, the state distributor for Cairo Governorate and southern Qalyubia, is replacing about 490,000 mechanical meters with remotely read ones in the sectors under its Helmiyet el-Zaytoun control centre, which is itself being rebuilt. Elsewedy Electric T&D and Toyota Tsusho signed the engineering contract on 30 November 2020, financed by a Japanese ODA loan through JICA; the meters are Iskraemeco IE.5 and IE.7 units reporting over G3 power-line or cellular links. This is not a prepayment scheme. The company describes a meter with no top-up card: consumption is read remotely, the subscriber receives an SMS bill and pays online, the meter flags tampering, and the utility can cut supply without a site visit. A separate and larger conversion to prepaid card meters runs alongside it at the same company. Delivery has been slow. Toyota Tsusho expected the system to start operating in mid-2023 and the ministry described a 30-month build; installation actually began in Hadayek el-Qubba in April 2025, in a first phase of roughly 50,000 meters. The promised cuts in outages and distribution losses remain projections, and no cumulative installed figure has been published.
The North Cairo package covers about 490,000 meters (the contractor announced approximately 500,000) plus a rebuilt control centre for the Helmiyet el-Zaytoun sector, within a three-company programme of roughly 965,000 meters costing about US$226M that also serves Alexandria and North Delta (Al-Masry Al-Youm, citing the Ministry of Electricity). Against that, delivery is late: Toyota Tsusho put commencement of operation at mid-2023 and the ministry described a 30-month implementation from November 2020, but NCEDC only began installing in April 2025, in a first phase of about 50,000 meters (Masrawy). Chairman Hesham Afifi set a 2024/25 target of 217,000 smart meters — 190,000 through the JICA project and 27,000 for large subscribers — alongside 317,000 conversions to prepaid cards (Youm7, 8 May 2024). Every figure here is a utility, ministry or contractor statement relayed by the press; no audit and no independent evaluation of loss reduction, outage frequency or collection performance was located, and no cumulative count of meters actually installed has been published.
🎓 Lesson
Egypt runs two metering programmes at once and they are not the same system. One is a donor-financed AMI rollout that reads the meter remotely and bills afterwards; the other is a much larger conversion to prepaid cards that makes the household pay first. Only the first arrived in these districts, and it arrived about two years behind the contractor's own schedule. Reading a country's metering statistics without separating the two produces a number that means nothing.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏘️ District
Costabout JPY 10bn (about US$96M) for the North Cairo EPC contract; the Ministry of Electricity put the North Cairo package including the control centre at about US$90M
FundingJapanese ODA loan via JICA to the Egyptian Electricity Holding Company; part of a package of about US$226M also covering Alexandria and North Delta
Sources
↗ Cairo Governorate — North Cairo Electricity Distribution CompanyFetched. Authority, and the scope anchor: the governorate lists NCEDC among its own entities and defines its service area as Cairo Governorate plus the southern extension of Qalyubia. Carries no subscriber numbers and nothing on this project.
↗ Toyota Tsusho — contract announcement (contractor)Fetched. Verifies the client (EEHC and NCEDC), the consortium with Elsewedy Electric, the Hitachi ABB distribution management system, approximately 500,000 meters to be replaced, a contract worth approximately JPY 10bn, and financing by a Japanese ODA loan through JICA. Also the source of the missed schedule: it states operation was expected to commence in mid-2023.
↗ Daily News Egypt — Japan-Egypt signing, 30 November 2020 (press)Fetched. Dates the signing to 30 November 2020 and values the North Cairo component at about US$96M. Its figures for blackout reduction and theft prevention are stated as expectations at signing, not measured results, and are not used as impact in this entry.
↗ Al-Masry Al-Youm — ministry on the 490,000-meter replacement (press)Fetched. Gives the deployment footprint (Helmiya, Matariya, Marg), the 490,000 meters, about US$90M with JICA financing, the new Helmiya sector control centre, a 30-month implementation period from November 2020, and the wider three-company programme of about 965,000 meters for about US$226M. Reports no installed count.
↗ Iskraemeco — NCEDC project page (vendor)Fetched. Technical detail: IE.5 single-phase and IE.7 three-phase meters, G3-PLC or GPRS/3G/4G modems, AC750 data concentrators, head-end system, five-year operation and maintenance. Decisive on the mechanism question: it describes remote reading only and mentions no prepayment functionality. Vendor material, so used for specification, not for outcomes.
↗ Iskraemeco — factory acceptance test milestone (vendor)Fetched. Records the factory acceptance test of the IE.5 single-phase meters at Kranj, Slovenia, with NCEDC, TEPSCO, EEHC and Elsewedy Electric T&D present. The page carries no date, so it cannot be used to date progress; it is included only as confirmation that the meters reached acceptance testing.
↗ Masrawy — installation begins, 23 April 2025 (press, operator statements)Fetched. The most recent dated status found: NCEDC announces the start of installation in Hadayek el-Qubba, a first phase of about 50,000 meters against a 490,000 target under the Helmiyet el-Zaytoun control centre. Describes the meter as working without a top-up card, with an SMS bill paid via Fawry or online, electronic theft detection, remote disconnection for non-payment, and replacement at no cost to the subscriber.
↗ Youm7 — NCEDC chairman on 2024/25 targets, 8 May 2024 (press, operator statements)Fetched. Chairman Hesham Afifi gives the FY2024/25 plan: 217,000 smart meters, of which 190,000 through the JICA project and 27,000 for large subscribers, plus 317,000 conversions to prepaid meters. This is the sentence that separates the two programmes and prevents them being reported as one.
↗ Ministry of International Cooperation — loan record (authority)Fetched. Records the Electricity Distribution System Improvement Project for Alexandria, North Cairo and North Delta: donor Japan, loan of JPY 24,762M, beneficiary the Ministry of Electricity and Renewable Energy, locations including Cairo. Flagged discrepancy: this page dates the loan signature to 10 February 2022, while press reports refer to a 2016 loan agreement and an EPC contract signed in November 2020. The entry therefore asserts only the EPC contract date, not a loan date.
↗ Salwa Ismail, Antipode 58(1), 2026 — prepaid meters in Egypt (peer-reviewed)Fetch blocked (HTTP 403); title, author, journal, volume and argument confirmed via the publisher listing and search results. Concerns the SEPARATE nationwide prepaid-card rollout, not this AMI project, and is cited only to show that the prepaid track has drawn peer-reviewed critical scrutiny while this one has none. Contains no figures used in this entry.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “North Cairo's JICA-Funded Smart Meter Rollout” — Cairo, Egypt. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/cairo-north-smart-metering/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
