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Since its inception in 2016, the Egyptian Knowledge Bank  (EKB) has evolved to become a core pillar of education in Egypt as well as an expression of the country’s commitment to modernizing and democratizing access to knowledge. The EKB is both a digital learning platform and the hub of an ecosystem that supports learners, teachers and educational institutions across a diverse country of over 110 million people. It provides free access to an extensive range of educational and scholarly content as well as capacity-building courses to optimize the use of this content. In line with Egypt’s vision for 2030, the EKB seeks to harness increasingly affordable digital technology to enhance education for all and foster a culture of lifelong learning. For these reasons, the platform – or, more accurately, the people, technology and ideas that underlie and drive it – have much to teach the world about the digital transformation of education.

This case study attempts to tell the ‘story’ of the EKB. It traces how the platform started life as an effort to conjoin and harmonize different online portals for education and quickly became a vehicle to consolidate subscriptions to journals and other knowledge content, alleviating a financial burden that was historically borne independently by educational institutions.

As part of the Gateways Initiative, UNESCO and UNICEF work with countries to develop case studies of major public digital learning platforms. Each case study describes a country’s preeminent public digital learning platform and tells the ‘story’ of its development. (In cases where countries have more than one important platform, the case study accounts for this multiplicity.) Collectively and individually, the Gateways case studies strengthen the global knowledge base of how to create, implement, and iteratively improve digital learning platforms and content.