Great to see all of you making progress with vision and action! Not too much I can contribute right now, but this:
That’s a really good idea for a revenue source of an OpenVillage house. With some caveats: importers are usually exploitative wholesalers and one of the reason why some countries don’t get paid a fair livable price for their products, esp. for agricultural ones. So you need some hacks. From our experience with “fair and direct” coffee sales from Nepal to Europe, here are some general recommendations:
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Try to find a product that you can market from within Egypt, because without European wages for marketing, much more of the final sales price will arrive in Egypt. Even more when marketing to final customers, not to intermediate traders who will only sell it again with their 30-50% margin added. For this type of marketing, you want to market to small and medium businesses, because they will be ok with communication in English, and because they are a target group that you can easily find out about online. A good example is marketing coffee to cafés – in our case together with a unique story that they can tell their customers.
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Your advantage with this direct sales strategy is that, by cutting out a lot of middlemen, you can have really competitive prices and still get a better profit for yourself. That will help to offset the slightly weird scenario of being approached by an Egyptian company you don’t know. Even better to offset that is to partner with a European NGO dedicated to supporting such products, so their name can appear in the marketing communications you create in Egypt.
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Europe seems a good export market for Egypt, as it’s close, has a high price level, and is well connected (container shipping in the Mediterranean and up North). Also, there is a single market inside the European Union, so once the goods passed one of its borders, they can be distributed to any European country without additional customs formalities.
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For exporting to Europe, at first start with a product that has few customs formalities, and low customs rate. You can find that out in the TARIC database. You don’t want to have to deal with phytosanitary certificates (“food hygiene”), or with controlled substances. So don’t go for meat products or hempseed oil, instead for something like coffee. For these goods, a counterparty on the European side can get the goods through without much hassle (we’ve done it).
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The hassle for customs is the same for each type of item, independent of the amount of the item. So 20 tons of coffee is the same form-filling hassle as is 100 kg of coffee. To keep overheads low and manageable for yourselves, go for larger amounts of one product, not for many different products. This way, you can prepare the forms yourselves, not needing costly “professional” help except the first time, where it is advisable to get a “template” for the following trades.
Only half of the above is tested, the other half is what we’re doing next based on previous experience (read, failures). So take with a grain of salt, and welcome to ask for details or feedback when you get closer to this business model for an OpenVillage space 