CCIEs Worldwide (and the state of Egypt in high-tech industry)

I browsed the CCIEs worldwide list and found some interesting numbers, it sheds some light on the distribution of the top networking talent in the field geographically.

First the totals (last updated 2/5/2010):

Total of Worldwide CCIEs	20864
Total of Routing and Switching CCIEs	17774
Total of Security CCIEs	2393
Total of Service Provider CCIEs	1752
Total of Storage Networking CCIEs	150
Total of Voice CCIEs	1180
Total of Wireless CCIEs	20

Then the country-by country numbers:

USA	5494
P.R. China	3619
Japan	1142
United Kingdom	1052
Korea	1033

Naturally, USA is the largest country to have certified CCIEs (being that it is the home country of Cisco and the largest market for its products), but the interesting number is that Asia holds the largest number of CCIEs collectively (given the population numbers), the really surprising omission in this list is India (which comes in the seventh place), it gives it a more realistic perspective of top tech-related talent distribution in developed countries (with China holding about 5 times the CCIEs compared to India).

Then the Arab World

Saudi Arabia	193
United Arab Emirates	169
Egypt	110
Israel	65
Kuwait	47
Qatar	34
Jordan	33
Lebanon	28
Bahrain	13
Oman	10
Algeria	6
Morocco	6
Tunisia	4
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya	2
Palestinian Territory	2
Yemen	2

Here we find that Saudi Arabia holds the largest number of CCIEs, followed by UAE then Egypt, this shows that Egypt (unlike public press from the Government) is not the largest pool of high-tech talent in the Middle East (and its not Israel either, shown here for comparison purposes), but Saudi Arabia and UAE, this might not be true in all of the high-tech segments, but it indicates that the efforts excreted by the Governmental initiatives in Egypt are not that effective in creating a pool of high-end expertise in the field.
Egypt is not even the largest country in Africa to hold CCIEs, South Africa (with 122 CCIEs) is higher in this list.