A sustainable future

After launching the Foundation, Yousriya continued to search for other ways she could spread her message of empowerment. With gender equality at the forefront of her advocacy she joined the boards of the National Council for Women (established in 2000) and the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (1988). She remains involved with both to this day. 

Sustainability and the environment were also important to Yousriya and she joined the board at the Ecumenical Development Cooperative Society (now known as the Oikocredit International Share Foundation), a worldwide cooperative that promotes and invests in sustainable development.

In parallel to Yousriya’s personal projects, the SFSD continued its ambitious and far-reaching initiatives based around four core pillars: economic empowerment, social empowerment, access to high quality education, and encouraging artistic and cultural creativity.

In economic empowerment, SFSD has run a number of programmes aimed at providing the most disadvantaged groups with the necessary skills to enter the labour market.

It also has also supported smallholder farmers through its Agricultural Development Programme, which provided 2,500 beneficiaries (30 percent female) with training in everything from banana waste recycling and fish farm management to safe poultry raising.

Another flagship programmes was the Sawiris Job Creation Competition, which invites NGOs to propose innovative job creation initiatives that are responsive to labour market needs. Between 2004 and 2015, the SFSD organised four editions of this biannual competition to create more than 40,000 job opportunities in 23 governorates across Egypt.

In October 2015, SFSD launched its fifth and final edition of the Sawiris Job Creation initiative under the slogan “Empowering Upper Egyptians”. The main objective was to create 20,000 sustainable jobs for the people of Upper Egypt governorates including Fayoum, Beni Suef, Minya, Assiut, Sohag, Qena, Luxor and Aswan.

As a guide, SFSD supports initiatives that are innovative, respond to socioeconomic needs, show strong potential for success, and can be promoted as a model for replication or adaptation by other institutions. Such projects are seen as the starting point of a long-term process of social change and economic growth, on both an individual and a societal level.

Through its social empowerment work, the SFSD seeks to help households – and in particular women - out of extreme poverty and enhance their capacity to be resilient against economic and health shocks. One example of this was the foundation’s partnership with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which promoted the health of mothers and children in the first 1,000 days of life. Another was the ‘She can!' initiative, which sought to boost female literacy in Giza and Fayoum.

The Bab Amal project, meanwhile, was launched in 2018, using the adaptation, implementation, and evaluation of the Ultra-Poor Graduation approach created by BRAC, an international NGO founded by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, which changed the course of development work in Bangladesh and beyond.   

Bab Amal (“Door of Hope” in Arabic) is a multi-intervention contextualised programme, which served 2,267 households in its first phase in two of Egypt’s poorest governorates, Assiut and Sohag.

It is currently moving towards the second phase of implementation for 3,600 families. The programme provides various forms of assistance, such as giving families tools to generate income, providing financial support for essential expenses, helping them access basic services, offering financial services, teaching valuable life skills, providing job training, and offering hands-on guidance. These efforts aim to help families become financially stable, resilient, and confident so they can lift themselves out of extreme poverty. 

The Foundation’s bid to encourage artistic and cultural creativity is founded on a belief that both provide a positive contribution to society. And so its annual Sawiris Cultural Award is awarded each year to recognize excellent literary works by emerging and established Egyptian writers.

There are multiple categories with cash prizes up to 200,000 Egyptian pounds (US$ 6,466). Established in 2005 and regarded as one of Egypt’s most prestigious arts prizes, there were a record 1,403 entries in 2022.

In 2018, the Sawiris Arts and Culture Scholarship was established, and it is awarded to Egyptians seeking to do their Bachelor’s (BA) or Master’s (MA) degree in arts or culture.

All persons who receive support from the foundation must be Egyptian nationals residing in Egypt, and to ensure they continue to benefit their home country and local communities, scholarship recipients must commit to living in Egypt for two to three years following the completion of their studies.

Naguib Sawiris, vice chairman of the foundation, is a huge patron of the arts, culture, and cinema, and in 2017 he founded the El Gouna Film Festival. In an interview with Forbes Magazine in 2020, Naguib admitted that movies have always been a passion for him. “I’m like a small child getting chocolate when watching a movie.. I normally sneak out of parties to go and watch a movie. It helps me relax and it stimulates my mind, it gives me happiness- or sorrow, and it keeps my emotions ongoing.”

Through supporting these programmes, the Sawiris family strives to encourage promising young Egyptians and to promote existing artists, producers, film makers, and writers to continue their journey in enriching the lives of Egyptians and Arabs worldwide through art. Over the past years, these programmes have created an ideal platform to do just that and to promote appreciation of the arts and culture in Egyptian society. This is a reflection of the family’s deep philanthropic commitment to developing Egypt and giving back to their community.

But while it sees rewarding the current talents among Egyptian society as important, the Foundation sets even more precedence on its vow to increase access to high quality education. Over the years there have been a number of educational initiatives and scholarships established, beginning with the Onsi Sawiris Scholarship, in partnership with Orascom Construction. 

The first of its kind in the country, the merit-based and fully-funded scholarship provides Egyptian students the chance to pursue a master’s degree in Engineering or Business Administration at some of the leading universities in the USA, including Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

To date, nearly 100 students have benefited from the programme, including, in 2002, one 17-year-old Noura Selim, who went on to become the Executive Director of SFSD. 

The Sawiris family has always keen on investing in its community, be it through the arts or education. The greater objective of this is to lift the population out of poverty and lower the unemployment rate among Egyptian youth by ensuring they have access to high quality education. Through the foundation, they have established numerous schools, programs, and scholarships through their family foundation with the objective of providing opportunities and access for exceptional Egyptian students to realise their potential, no matter where they come from.

One of the projects, “Schools for Egypt”, focussed on establishing 60 community schools in rural and remote areas in Upper Egypt, including Asyut, Sohag, and Qena, where many school-age children lack access to quality education. “Schools for Egypt” was launched in 2013 and had a total budget of EGP 34.7m (US$1.2m), which is used in partnership with Egyptian companies and NGOs, to build schools and train local teachers and supervisors from the Ministry of Education.

Children with disabilities were also supported through a special programme called “Inclusive Education for All,” in collaboration with the Housing and Development Bank (HDB) and Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS). It targeted five communities’ access to inclusive primary education in Sohag, using community-based initiatives to support the integration of children with disabilities into ten public schools, and to advocate for their right to equal access to quality education.

In a new experimental programme, the Foundation also partnered with Indian NGO, Pratham, to roll out a programme called “Teaching at the Right Level” (TaRL).

Created by Pratham in 2001, TaRL focuses on educating students by grouping them in classes based on their skills and level of literacy, rather than their age. The idea behind this approach is to improve the quality, speed, and the delivery of education received by students by ensuring they are evaluated regularly and eliminating the fear of getting bad grades. It focuses on whether they are actually learning and being adequately and appropriately challenged, instead of only testing them at the end of the school terms.

This 18-month programme, implemented by Educate Me Foundation, was piloted in 35 public schools and 15 community schools across Sohag, Beni Suef, Qena, and Cairo, and was the first of its kind in the region.

In October 2020, it won the UNESCO-Hamdan bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Prize for Outstanding Practice and Performance in Enhancing the Effectiveness of Teachers. Today, the TaRL method has been launched in several community schools in India and ten countries in Africa. 

Another notable education initiative from the SFSD was the “School Transformation Journey” (STJ). Also in partnership with Educate Me, this three-year programme, which concluded in December 2022, overhauled 20 primary public schools across Sohag and Beni Suef.

It also included a series of capacity-building and intensive training to more than 700 teachers and staff members of these public schools to identify the gaps, improve the knowledge, elevate the quality and impact of their education.

A large strand of this was helping pupils go beyond rote learning and equip teachers to give students more context with lessons to make them more impactful. The SFSD donated EGP 8.7m (US$282,000) to this programme.

As with all SFSD initiatives – and true to the ethos of the founder, these education programmes deliver multi-level impact, collectively uplifting teachers, students, families, and whole communities.