Steve Ranger's Notebook: Offshoring, Cairo and KFC

silicon.com is proud to introduce a new column by our business editor Steve Ranger, in which he'll deliver the lowdown on the real stories behind the headlines.

The Sphinx, Cairo's ancient stone lion with a king's head, has watched the trials and tribulations of humanity for thousands of year. So when it opens its eyes in the morning, what does it now see?

The open desert and a few archaeologists banging away with little hammers? You've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark too many times.

Try a row of satellite dishes and the local KFC. (See the view from the Sphinx here.)

Egypt might be famous for its pyramids and mummies but it's not stuck in the past, as our perceptions of it might be. It's a young state, with between 15 million and 25 million people living in Cairo alone, depending on which measure you're using. The country churns out around 250,000 graduates each year and that means it needs lots of new jobs.

To drum up those jobs, it wants a piece of the lucrative IT offshoring market and thus is offering juicy incentives to companies that want to go offshore but don't fancy the nine or 10 hours it takes to fly to Mumbai.

The government is shoring up its tech credentials by building a 'Smart Village' to host its new tech companies out on the Cairo ring road.

Getting anywhere on the ring road itself is not for the faint-hearted. It's a bit like the M25 but with pot holes, horse-drawn carts and pedestrians wandering aimlessly across. In 35-degree heat.

It also operates a permanent rush hour, with drivers squeezing five cars of traffic onto a road built with three and constantly leaning on their horns. Despite the air conditioning on our bus I was sweating by the end of the journey to the business park.

At least I was doing better than some of the others in our party who had to cope with upset stomachs as well. For them the hour-long drive from the hotel to the ring road must have felt about as long as it took to build the pyramids (20 years if you're asking).

And so it was a little unnerving to find myself in a call centre in a business park (see a photo of it here) that wouldn't be out of place on the outskirts of Reading, except surrounded by a howling desert.

From what I saw, the Egyptians certainly have the people and are building the infrastructure - both physical and legal - to make the country attractive to companies looking to offshore IT and call centres.

So will it take off as a destination? Maybe. It's very small compared to India but it wants to grow fast. And it neatly fills the gap between India and Eastern European offshore operations.

But there's still an edge to the country - plenty of armed tourist police around and security guards that check under your taxi before allowing it into the hotel. And Egyptian execs admit that foreigners - especially from the US - can't see any difference between Egypt and the Middle East.

There's certainly more to Egypt than sand - but it might be a while before its home-grown 'Silicon Valley' is better known that its Valley of the Kings.