WASHINGTON: Economies in the Middle East and North Africa face a “shadow of uncertainty” from ongoing tensions in the region, a senior IMF official said.
“We are in a context where the overall outlook is cast into shadows,” Jihad Azour, the International Monetary Fund’s director for the Middle East and Central Asia department, said in an interview in Washington.
“The shadow of uncertainty on the geopolitical side is an important one,” added Azour, a recent candidate for the next Lebanese president.
In the face of the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Sudan and a recent cut to oil supplies by Gulf countries, the IMF has pared back its growth outlook for the Middle East and North Africa region once again.

The IMF expects growth in MENA of 2.7 percent this year — 0.2 percentage points below its January forecast — before picking up again next year, the IMF said in its regional economic outlook report.
The risks to growth in the MENA region remain heightened, the IMF said, pointing to the danger of greater regional spillovers from the ongoing Israel-Gaza war.
“We have concerns about the immediate and lasting impact of conflict,” Azour said.
The IMF report said that economic activity in Gaza has “come to a standstill” and estimates that economic output in the West Bank and Gaza contracted by 6 percent last year.
The IMF said the report excludes economic projections for the West Bank and Gaza for the next five years “on account of the unusually high degree of uncertainty.”
The IMF cannot lend to the West Bank and Gaza because they are not IMF member countries.
However, Azour said it has provided the Palestinian Authority and the central bank with technical assistance during the current conflict.
“When we move into the reconstruction phase, we will be part of the international community support to the region,” he added.
Azour also discussed the situation in Sudan, where thousands have been killed in a civil war that has also devastated the economy, causing it to contract by almost 20 percent last year, according to the IMF.
“The country is barely functioning, institutions have been dismantled,” he said.
“And for an economy, for a country like Sudan, with all this potential, it’s important to stop the bleeding very quickly and move to a phase of reconstruction,” he added.
The recent Houthi attacks have particularly badly hit the Egyptian economy on Red Sea shipping, which caused trade through the Egypt-run Suez Canal to more than halve — depriving the country of a key source of foreign exchange.
Egypt reached an agreement last month to increase an existing IMF loan package from $3 billion to $8 billion after its central bank hiked interest rates and allowed the pound to plunge by nearly 40 percent.
A key pillar of the current IMF program is the privatization of Egypt’s state-owned enterprises, many of which are owned by or linked to the military.
“This is a priority for Egypt,” Azour said. Egypt needs to have a growing private sector and give space for the private sector to create more jobs.”
“We have an opportunity to re-engineer the state’s role, to give the state more responsibility as an enabler and less as a competitor,” he said.

DUBAI: Lawyer Omar Ushari still remembers the hope that gripped Khartoum after the uprising that overthrew President Omar Bashir in 2019. Now, after a year of war between rival generals, much of the Sudanese capital lies in ruins.
The 46-year-old, then detained for his activism, celebrated behind bars when Bashir was toppled in a palace coup.
In the heady days that followed, as the army promised a transition to elective civilian rule, Ushari was released and set to work on his dream project: a literary cafe near the banks of the Nile.
Named Rateena, his cafe swiftly became known as a safe haven for young activists eager to contribute to building a “better Sudan.”
But on April 15 last year, the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces went to war, and Ushari watched both his project and his dreams for the country “fade, bit by bit.”

For months, he braved raging street battles to visit Rateena, “sit in the dark, take stock of what had been looted since my last visit, and reminisce.”
He did not understand how “the music that filled the space, the lectures and debates people shared, had been replaced with stray bullets strewn around me and the sound of tank fire outside.”
Now, as the war has entered its second year, with thousands dead and millions more driven from their homes, Ushari says he is “only one of the thousands of dreams shattered” — a microcosm of “a stolen revolution.”
Bashir’s ouster in April 2019 ushered in a civilian-led transition that saw an outpouring of “hope, inspiration and vibrancy” among young Sudanese, said Samah Salman, who worked in corporate venture capital then.
Startups were “springing up all across Sudan,” she said from the US, “all building extraordinary solutions to real needs ordinary Sudanese people were facing.”
Salman reviewed over 50 startups in telehealth, agritech, renewable energy, logistics, and fintech solutions, crediting the boom to “the energy of the revolution.”
According to Ushari, “hopes were high that Sudan was finally on the right path, out of the shadows and heading toward democracy, toward freedom.”
Like countless others, communications expert Raghdan Orsud, 36, wanted to play her part.
She co-founded Beam Reports to investigate disinformation in Sudan — “out of the belief in the role media can play in democratic transition,” she said from London.
But that transition ended in October 2021, two months after Beam Reports launched.
The same generals who would later go to war — army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his then-deputy RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — ousted civilians from the transitional administration.
“Nothing was the same after the coup,” Ushari said.
“It was a painful time. They were killing protesters every week, but still, we had hope.”
Then, one fateful Saturday at the end of Ramadan, the people of Khartoum awoke to the sounds of air strikes and shelling as their worst fears came true: the erstwhile allies had turned their guns on each other.
Bodies began piling up on the streets as vicious urban warfare drove millions to flee.
Orsud had just bought studio-grade recording equipment, “still in their boxes,” when RSF paramilitaries seized and looted her offices.
Ushari was piecing together a life in Cairo when he received a video message showing a massive fire.
“That’s how I found out Rateena had burned down,” he said.
Countless Sudanese in the diaspora — who had spent decades saving up to build their Khartoum homes — have been forced to watch from afar as the RSF looted them.
“At some point, he was praying for an airstrike to hit the house,” pastry chef Shaimaa Adlan, 29, said in Cairo, referring to her father in Saudi Arabia.
“He would have rather seen it destroyed than know his life’s work was being used as a paramilitary base.”
Adlan had started a catering business in Khartoum before finding herself in Egypt — uprooted and jobless.
But barely a year later, she sprints through a bustling kitchen in Cairo, shouting orders to her staff and fussing over dishes.
Back home, Salman says the war has not crushed Sudanese entrepreneurialism, just redirected it.
She said tech entrepreneurs now crowdsource real-time safety updates instead of protest plans and optimize evacuation paths instead of delivery routes.
The same young people organizing demonstrations now coordinate aid, becoming what the UN calls “the front line” of humanitarian response.
And in displacement centers and the diaspora, the dream of a new Sudan has not been forgotten.
“No matter where we’ve been exiled or what remote Sudanese state we’ve ended up in, there’s still a spark of the revolution left in every heart,” Ushari said.
“Sudan is ours, it’s all of ours,” said Orsud, whose fact-checking team has resumed operations from Nairobi.
“What else would we do besides rebuild it, over and over?“