Roadmap to empowerment

Even after attaining her first degree, Yousriya’s passion for learning remained unsatiated. In 1982, she went on to do a Masters in business administration at the American University in Cairo, after which she enrolled in courses at Harvard Kennedy School and then Harvard Business School. The subjects included leadership, environmental economics, and climate change.

Yousriya viewed her continued academic progress as key to maximising the impact she could have as her philanthropic ambitions grew. 

The Zabbaleen community would form a central motivation to her early charitable endeavours. Yousriya’s eye-opening experience in Mokattam in 1979 elicited a yearning to improve the living conditions of the garbage collectors and in 1984, she established the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE), an NGO that would focus on improving the healthcare, education, and living conditions of the Zabbaleen.

“It all started with the Zabbaleen women,” explains Samih. “But then she noticed that those Zabbaleen as a whole, the whole group are completely marginalised, mistreated, and nobody is really helping them at all. So she embraced the whole sector and that's how it became a bit more work for her in that domain.”

Samih has good reason to remember this period well, for he and his brothers were also heavily involved. “When my three sons were young, I would take them with me to the garbage-collector communities,” said Yousriya. “I wanted them to see first-hand that there were many people living in difficult conditions and to encourage them to think of ways to help them.” 

As children who’d been raised in comfortable surroundings and enjoyed the best education available, the young Sawiris children found the visits to the Zabbaleen slums a chastening, and often daunting experience. 

“Slowly she started introducing us to these areas where she was active,” remembers Samih. “Being dragged, as a little kid of eight or nine years by your mother to a slum, and then going to the depths of the slum to see how the children our age were living, to give some of our old toys, which was mandatory otherwise we didn't get new ones. This was one of these experiences that is still in my head. The fear from all the stench, the darkness, these little alleys, all these kids running around barefoot. These stay in my memories as if it happened yesterday.”

Samih and his brothers would soon realise that the visits were integral for their mother to teach them the importance of helping those less fortunate. “She wanted to make sure that her kids realise how privileged they are. This was probably the best introduction she did to us to understand why it's mandatory to help. This episode of her social work also made it clear to us that when we grow up, when we have money, we should be helping those kids and those communities.”

Being a working mother was already a radical proposition – Samih recalls: “As a kid, for us it was mummy's not here because she is working, it didn't matter [whether] working for others or for money.” But Yousriya wasn’t content with just breaking glass ceilings, she wanted to also increase her philanthropic impact. 

As finance manager for the Ford Foundation in Cairo, Yousriya set up a private audit firm that would provide services to nonprofit organisations. She also helped establish other charitable organisations in addition to APE, including the Egyptian Organisation for Street Children and the Egyptian Liver Care Society.

In 1984, Yousriya Sawiris founded the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE) with the intention of protecting livelihoods and improving the living conditions of the Zabbaleen. In addition to providing literacy classes and mother and child programmes, APE offers opportunities for upskilling in areas like composting, rug weaving, and patchwork. 

Suzie Griess is the chair of APE and a childhood friend and cousin of Yousriya. She has seen first-hand the influence APE's founder has had on the Zabbaleen community.

"The community of garbage collectors are very marginalised and they live in the outskirts of the city," she explains. "There was a call from a lot of people to try to help these families and this community because they are not part of the formal system of solid waste management in the city of Cairo.” 

Recalling how APE began, Griess says: "Yousriya started going to Mokattam and supporting some of the families there, many of them really were very destitute. They needed healthcare. They needed support. They needed people to interact with them, to show them that they were people who mattered. And this was where she was really giving a lot of herself and her money to support those people. This was the founding of APE.

“The idea behind all of this was to introduce literacy and teach the women crafts so that they could earn some income to support their families and gain a certain independence.

“Seeing all of those women who were deprived, who were illiterate, who came as immigrants from Upper Egypt, with their families living in squalor, and going in herself and walking through their homes, talking to them. I mean, this is the wonderful thing.

“Yousriya is really a very action-oriented person. She's a fighter. She's a leader, she has always been like that.”