Egypt and Tunisia have been included in a recent listing of the top 10 countries in the world for launching a startup based on several criteria.
The infographic was created by Marketing Executive of the Brighton School of Business and Management Richard Madison and published by Seedstars World, a Switzerland-based company that works on promoting entrepreneurship through startups in emerging markets.
Madison, who notes that there are many promising startup hubs around the world other than the traditionally thought of cities like Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Berlin, based his list on factors such as access to corporate income tax rates, company registration fees and access to the Internet.
The infographic first lists the top 10 countries, which are China, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, India, Australia, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, Egypt and Bulgaria, respectively. It then points out the best cities in each of them based on the factors used to compile the list.
Madison notes that for Tunisia, whose main startup hub is its capital Tunis, its closeness to Europe and the novelty of its startup scene are among the factors that make it one of the most promising entrepreneurial countries.
The country's startup scene has for the most part been dominated by community-centered tech products aimed at contributing to civil society, such as one of Tunisia's most prominent startups Tunisia Live, the country's first English news website that started as a breaking-news media platform to transmit live images.
As for Egypt, whose main startup hubs are its capital Cairo and Alexandria, Madison notes that while its economic innovation has been growing over the last decade, it is when the startup scene exploded in the last few years that Egypt earned its spot on the global startup map.
Although Egypt's startup market has covered a wide variety of businesses, most of its startups have either centered around technology or used it as a platform, due to the growing entrepreneurial culture among the country's young tech-savvy engineers.
One of Egypt's most prominent startups is Instabug, an innovative bug-reporting app that made its way from Cairo to Silicon Valley. Other well-known Egyptian tech startups include Slickr, a fashion social network and e-commerce website and Eventtus, a networking platform for discovering and promoting events.