Anbooba Project — The SMS Solution That Beat Egypt’s Gas Cylinder Black Market

Anbooba Project

The Anbooba Project was a technology initiative conceived and built by Mohamed Zeineldin in 2011, using SMS Gateway technology to tackle one of Egypt’s most persistent and damaging household welfare problems: the black market resale of subsidised gas cylinders.

The project won the Orange Egypt “Mobile for Poor” competition and was also recognised at the TIEC Hayee Competition — two of Egypt’s leading technology and social impact contests at the time.

The Problem

In Egypt, subsidised gas cylinders — known locally as “anbooba” (أنبوبة) — are a critical household resource for millions of families who rely on them for cooking and heating. The Egyptian government subsidises these cylinders to keep them affordable, with a retail price of 6 Egyptian Pounds.

The problem was the black market. Subsidised cylinders were being intercepted and resold at 25 Egyptian Pounds — more than four times the official price. Poor households, the very people the subsidy was designed to protect, were the ones paying the inflated price while the benefit of the government subsidy was captured by resellers.

At the same time, newly built compounds on the outskirts of Cairo — including Alrehab and Madeenty — had not yet been connected to Egypt’s national gas pipeline network. Residents there had no alternative but to rely entirely on cylinder-based gas supply, making them especially vulnerable to black market pricing.

The government had no reliable mechanism to track where subsidised cylinders were going, who was receiving them, or whether the support was reaching the households it was intended for.

The Solution

The Anbooba Project used SMS Gateway technology to digitise and automate the tracking of gas cylinder distribution from the point of subsidy allocation to the final household.

By introducing an SMS-based verification and registration step into the distribution chain, the system made it possible to:

  • Track each subsidised cylinder from allocation point to registered household
  • Verify that government support was reaching poor households — not being diverted into the black market
  • Register and serve compounds like Alrehab and Madeenty that lacked piped gas infrastructure, giving their residents access to the subsidised supply
  • Generate a data trail that could support audit, accountability, and policy improvement in the subsidy programme

The approach required no smartphone, no internet connection, and no technical literacy from end users — just an SMS, a technology channel that was already in the hands of the households the project was designed to serve.

Competition Results

The Anbooba Project was submitted to two competitions in 2011:

  • Orange Egypt — “Mobile for Poor” Competition — The project won, with the prize awarded in recognition of its application of mobile technology to solve a real social welfare problem
  • TIEC Hayee Competition — The project was also selected and recognised by TIEC (Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center), Egypt’s national body for technology entrepreneurship

Winning both competitions was validation not just of the technical approach, but of the real-world relevance of the problem being solved.

Why It Matters

The Anbooba Project is an early demonstration of the same thinking that runs through all of Mohamed Zeineldin‘s work: technology should solve real problems for real people — not just interesting engineering challenges.

In 2011, using SMS Gateways to protect a government welfare programme was a practical, deployable solution with immediate social impact. No complex infrastructure, no barriers to adoption, no dependency on smartphone penetration or internet access. Just a clear problem, a well-matched technology, and an implementation that worked.

That same instinct — building systems that are useful, accessible, and grounded in the real conditions of the people they serve — is what later drove the creation of DevOps Area, PikaDo, and Egypt IT Events.

About Mohamed Zeineldin

The Anbooba Project was built by Mohamed Zeineldin — now a Tech Lead with 15+ years of experience in cloud architecture, Kubernetes, and DevOps transformation at organisations including Vodafone, REWE Digital, GfK, and EPAM Systems.

He is the founder of DevOps Area — the #1 free Arabic DevOps learning platform — and co-founder of PikaDo.

Read Mohamed Zeineldin’s full bio →

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