Future of Egypt Authority to set rules for Red Sea gold prospectors, MP says
Members of parliament are still waiting to learn how prospecting will be licensed, Gibril Mahmoud Saad says. A tribal and parliamentary meeting also discussed people held over prospecting.
14 November 2026
The technical rules for organising informal gold prospecting in southern Egypt are to be set by the Future of Egypt Authority for Sustainable Development, the Red Sea MP Gibril Mahmoud Saad says. No mechanism has been announced yet.
Saad, who represents the constituency covering Safaga, El Quseir and Marsa Alam and is a sheikh of the Ababda tribe, told Extra News that MPs are waiting for that mechanism before they can answer prospectors' questions. He asked people working in the sector to hold off until it is announced and starts being applied, and said the arrangement would not sideline anyone working in the trade or any Egyptian company.
Licensed miners, among them international companies and the Sukari mine, employ workers from several governorates, Saad said, but large-scale mining does not reach the ravines and small valleys worked by the dahhaba — the informal prospectors — where families depend on the trade for their income.
The remarks follow an expanded meeting held under the patronage of Ibrahim El-Organi, head of the Union of Egyptian Tribes and Families, attended by members of both chambers of parliament, tribal and family representatives from Aswan, Halayeb, Shalatin and Marsa Alam, security bodies and the Future of Egypt Authority. It examined mechanisms for regularising prospecting and the cases of people held in connection with prospecting. Ababda and Bishari sheikhs in the Red Sea and Aswan governorates have thanked President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, whose directives on the file the speakers credit with opening it.