A social entrepreneur sees an inadequately addressed issue in society and uses creativity and perseverance to form an organization that finds practical solutions to the root problem. Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, is a global non-profit organization that supports social entrepreneurs worldwide. Recognizing and funding social entrepreneurs since 1980, and now operating in over 40 countries, Ashoka’s three main objectives are: to invest in social entrepreneurs; to create a link between business and social sectors while promoting development rather than offering charity services; and to professionalize the social sector. Funded by private organizations, including Hilti Foundation in Switzerland and Ford Foundation, Ashoka helps social entrepreneurs with the financial and administrative difficulties of getting an organization up and running. It has already secured funding for the next four years; the funds go to Ashoka headquarters in the States and are then allocated to the Egypt office.

Regional Director for the Arab world Dr. Iman Bibars explains that the concept behind Ashoka is to “invest in individuals” who in turn need to come up with a plan to make it financially sustainable in the long term.

Ashoka has provided invaluable support to people like Tamer Bahaa, the only deaf Egyptian to have graduated from university, who founded the National Association of the Deaf; Dina Abdel Wahab, who is giving children with special needs the chance for a mainstream education; and Magda Iskander, who created a new profession to provide jobs for the young and care for the sick and elderly.

Operating in Egypt since 2003, Ashoka has elected 14 Egyptians as Ashoka fellows, among them Bahaa, Abdel Wahab and Iskander. Ashoka provides its fellows with a stipend (the amount varies depending on the fellow’s circumstances) that helps them to network while assisting them in areas like business and legal issues, and in gaining visibility for their causes.

Bibars explains, “A social entrepreneur is somebody who is tenacious, creative, innovative a person who takes risks but calculated risks and who uses the tools of the business sector but for a social purpose. Which means they’re ambitious, they meet challenges, they don’t give up, and they lead to systemic pattern change.”

Beyond a crowded market in Hadayek El-Maadi, on the first floor of an apartment building that houses the National Association of the Deaf, the door is wide open and people are signing to each other animatedly. Tamer Bahaa, the head of the association’s board of directors, is a tall, smiling man who welcomes you and sits down to tell you about his own quest for education and his wish to help the Egyptian deaf. “Do you want a summary or the whole story? Because it’s a very long story,” Bahaa asks in sign language, through interpreter Wael Samir.

Bahaa could hear until he was 18 months old, when a doctor prescribed the wrong medicine, which led to a high fever and gradual deafness. At that point, he entered the world of 2 million deaf Egyptians whose prospects for an education, meaningful work and engagement in society were dim.

His odyssey started at a government school for the deaf in Abassiya in the early 80s, where the teachers, who were hearing people, didn’t know sign language, which is unfortunately the norm at Egyptian schools for the deaf. Bahaa read the teachers’ lips and learned sign language from classmates who had picked it up elsewhere. The speech therapy lab was often inexplicably locked when the time for that lesson came.

Bahaa loved learning and was good at subjects like math, drawing and geography, but he found Arabic grammar rules very difficult. “I would ask the teacher, but she couldn’t sign so she couldn’t give me the information properly,” he says. “Education for the deaf was a complete failure.”

Ashraf Talaat/Egypt Today Dina Abdel Wahab at the rooftop playground in the Mohandiseen Baby Academy

Nevertheless, encouraged by his family, Bahaa persevered and would borrow older brother Wael’s high school textbooks. However, since the deaf only had the right to finish middle school at the time, he wasn’t able to continue. (The Ministry of Education has since issued a decree that the deaf can complete high school in 1985).

After graduating with a middle school vocational certificate in carpentry, Bahaa found work at Osman Ahmed Osman & Co., the construction company. But instead of using his carpentry skills, he used to carry heavy loads. “I felt this wasn’t my place. I’d go to the bathroom and cry,” says Bahaa, whose dream was to graduate from the College of Applied Arts. When the engineers threw away their plans and drawings, Bahaa would tape them together and pore over them at home.

Then Bahaa learned about an adult education program that was open to company employees and told his mother he wanted to enroll. She convinced the principal that the disabled have an equal right to education, and Bahaa was in. “The first time I entered the class, my ears were red from fear. They could all hear and speak, and I was the only deaf person,” says Bahaa with a smile. He sat at the front of the room, copied the notes of the classmate next to him and not only received a high school vocational certificate, but was the third ranking student in carpentry on the national level.

Bahaa’s mother encouraged him to apply to university, and based on his grades, he was accepted at a teaching college, where the dean said that a deaf person couldn’t be a teacher but agreed to write a transfer request to the College of Applied Arts which was denied. Bahaa got accepted by writing to the Minister of Higher Education.

He finally started college two months into the academic year. Bahaa remembers, “I told myself, ‘If I’m going to be shy, I’ll never succeed. If I want something, I’ll ask, and if I don’t understand something, I’ll ask.’” He borrowed his classmates’ lecture notes and made every effort to excel.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today(2) Magda Iskander (Far right) at Care With Love helping a patient.

Bahaa was talented at technical drawing, and his classmates would gather around admiring his work. “You’ll be a big engineer one day,” they said, and they were right. Bahaa graduated second in his class, and now works at Petrojet petroleum company, as head the department qism decor that designs interior structures of buildings.

“How did you do it?” his deaf friends asked him, because what Bahaa had accomplished was close to impossible: He estimates that 99 percent of the deaf in Egypt are illiterate due to the obstacles they face.

Meeting regularly at a coffee shop with other educated deaf friends, Bahaa would discuss, in sign language, the problems of the deaf: poor education, few work opportunities and their lack of integration in society. The friends decided they needed an organization, so they pooled their own money and in 1997 founded The National Association of the Deaf.

Improving education remains one of their main goals, since reading and writing are their means of interaction with the hearing world. Bahaa took the government’s adult literacy textbooks and reproduced them in sign language, with the words of each lesson accompanied by a photo of a person signing what was written. The association runs two adult literacy classes.

Bahaa also wants the advocation of deaf children into mainstream schools, with speech therapy, so that deaf and hearing children can mix. “If we close in on the deaf, they won’t know how to interact in society There is a lack of awareness that the deaf are normal people just like everyone else. Many people stare when we speak in sign language.”

The young nursing team pose for a group picture with Magda Iskander.

The association holds classes that teach hearing people sign language, to raise awareness, provide more qualified teachers for schools and interpreters to help the deaf communicate in hospitals, courts, airports and police stations.

Bahaa pulls out the first dictionary of a unified sign language for the Arab world, The Dictionary of a Unified Sign Language for Arab Countries, which includes photos of people signing each word. Variations in signing meant that the deaf in different Arab countries could not understand each other, so Bahaa and his friends attended workshops in Egypt, Tunis and Syria to unify the sign language, with the dictionary as the result. The book and the workshops that helped realize it were funded by the Arab League.

The association also has creative solutions for everyday problems. The deaf cannot rely on ordinary alarm clocks, so Bahaa imported clocks from England, which come with an attachment that is placed under the person’s pillow that vibrates at the set time. An association member is now reproducing the clocks here.

“Fursat Amal” (A Chance to Work) is Bahaa’s next big project, in which 200 individuals will be trained in employable skills. Right now, schools for the deaf teach only carpentry and sewing, but this program will include hairdressing, plumbing, house painting and computing, among many others. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has already donated five computers.

The association runs exclusively on donations. A lot of the funding is comes from the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS). However, since the Ministry for Social Affairs does not provide funding which puts the project in a precarious position Bahaa is not daunted. In a written proposal to the ministry, he outlined a plan for a comprehensive center for the deaf that includes gardens, meeting places, a club, work training center, nursery, clinic, home for the elderly, literacy school, orphanage and administrative offices.

Bahaa, quite simply, is a remarkable man, a social entrepreneur who obviously is energized rather than overwhelmed by all these challenges. “The association is like a small tree, and it won’t grow in a day and a night, but we have to try,” he says, smiling.

“Listen, there’s something you must understand. Your son is retarded and will always be retarded,” the pediatrician told Dina Abdel Wahab, whose son Ali was born with Down’s syndrome. Abdel Wahab had been searching the internet for ways to help Ali, but the doctor thought she was wasting her time. Unfortunately, his attitude is all too common.

Looking back, Abdel Wahab says that having a child with Down’s syndrome wasn’t traumatic in itself; it was people’s reactions and their lack of support for her as a parent that made it so. Abdel Wahab and her husband didn’t know that Ali was born with Down’s syndrome until some time later. When her son was born, her doctors and family members decided to conceal the diagnosis from the baby’s parents.

When Ali was a month and a half old, he suffered a common ailment. Unable to reach their pediatrician, Abdel Wahab called another doctor who examined the baby and abruptly broke the news. “The way it was told to me, it was like there was a major disaster,” remembers Abdel Wahab. She tried to figure out where to go for help and found “absolutely no information and no resources. Nobody is willing to help you, [not] even your pediatrician,” she says.

The turning point came during a visit to Washington DC, where experts told Abdel Wahab that children with Down’s syndrome can be active members of society like everyone else. They stressed the need for early intervention to help develop their skills. Encouraged, Abdel Wahab returned to Egypt with physical therapy and speech therapy programs for Ali, hired therapists, and visited the States every six months to update the programs.

A sweet and caring child, Ali had a strong will to learn. Abdel Wahab’s goal was to enroll him in a mainstream preschool so he could be more independent and interact with other children. When she approached preschools, Abdel Wahab says, “Either they didn’t want to take him at all, or they asked ‘Are they aggressive? I don’t know if we can put them with other children.’”

Finally, a preschool accepted Ali, but his teachers didn’t allow him to do tasks he was already doing at home, like feeding himself or drawing with a pencil. They assumed he wasn’t capable.

“He wasn’t getting anything extra at preschool,” says Abdel Wahab. “Plus, I sent him there so that he could feel like a part of the team and rely on himself and what was happening was the opposite, because there was still a view of pity that, ‘Poor him, he cannot.’ They looked at me as the crazy mother who didn’t realize her son’s abilities and was pushing her son too hard,” she says.

The ideal preschool would accept and nurture every child, whether special needs, ‘regular,’ or gifted, so Abdel Wahab decided to create what she couldn’t find and opened The Baby Academy in 2000 in Heliopolis using her own private funds. Ashoka helped her with a financial model and a network of support to create a financial monitoring system for the preschool.

Skilled teachers were vital to her mission, but Abdel Wahab wasn’t impressed with the graduates of teaching institutes. “What they learn is quite obsolete very outdated methodologies and ways of thinking.”

She then decided to recruit university graduates from different fields who were open-minded and wanted to learn, and brought in educational consultants from Canada to train staff in the latest teaching methods so that they could work with each child’s unique abilities. “The teacher should know how to change her technique from one child to another. The child isn’t going to be put in a box because the teacher doesn’t know how to deal with him,” says Abdel Wahab.

The teachers also learned that by mainstreaming special kids, everyone benefits. Special kids learn from the other children, who develop compassion, helpfulness and acceptance of differences; the special kids become their friends, not people to be shunned by society.

The consultants visited every month in the beginning to update staff training, and the cost was enormous, with The Baby Academy losing money for three years, but Abdel Wahab believed in what she was doing. “This is just the cost of being a social entrepreneur,” she says. Other challenges cropped up too. Abdel Wahab, who had worked for the United Nations and Save the Children, was used to being an employee; now she had to run an entire business. “There were tons of problems Paperwork; regulations; policies that you have to abide by; dealing with the Ministry of Social Affairs. All of the governmental issues that you have to handle,” she says.

Then there was the doubt, everyone around her s “You’re always dreaming. These things happen in America. Where do you think you are? Society here won’t allow it. Parents won’t agree. If people find out you have special needs children, they won’t come. You’re going to fail.”

For Abdel Wahab, the first branch of The Baby Academy was an important test model to show that it could be done. She now runs two branches (in Heliopolis and Mohandiseen), with a total of 400 kids, 65 of whom have special needs, from mild to severe, and has established working relationships with 10 schools that accept special kids.

Today, eight-year-old Ali is a happy and sociable first grader at Cairo British International School, a mainstream school in Katameya. “He’s doing very well. Much, much better than I ever expected,” says his mother.

Abdel Wahab wants to provide the same opportunities for as many children as possible, so she aims to open The Baby Academy throughout Egypt and the Middle East, “to change people’s perceptions not just about inclusion of special needs, but about the importance of early childhood education.” This year, new branches are set to launch in Nasr City and 6th of October City, and in 2006, Abdel Wahab plans to open a headquarters, preschool and teacher training institute in Katameya to provide a pipeline of skilled teachers.

Management and leadership consultants are now working with staff to ensure the same quality in all branches and to build a community of people committed to the cause.

It seems to be working. Abdel Wahab vividly remembers overhearing an incident at The Baby Academy when a woman noticed a boy with special needs. “Is he in the same class with my granddaughter? I can’t believe this. He’ll give her his condition!” the grandmother exclaimed. Before Abdel Wahab had a chance to turn around, the teacher had stepped in to correct the woman’s misperceptions and explain the benefit of the children being together. Relieved, Abdel Wahab went on her way. Abdel Wahab wants Ali and all special kids to be valued members of society, but much needs to change first, which is why she hopes to start a Down’s syndrome organization to tackle key issues: development of education, support and information for parents, and creating a media awareness campaign to help spread positive, accurate information about special needs children.

At the moment, mainstreaming special kids is not even part of the law. Abdel Wahab explains, “You can ask for an exception and the exception is approved or not. So how can you be talking about inclusion, when actually your system and your laws are not pro-inclusion?”

There are many worthwhile initiatives for special needs children, but they aren’t trying to change the system itself, and without doing so, “it’s not going to solve the problem for the next generation,” says Abdel Wahab.

Despite the obstacles, it’s a long but encouraging process. Abdel Wahab tells the story of a physically challenged girl at The Baby Academy whose two- and three-year-old classmates always help her up the stairs and assist her in the classroom, not out of pity, but because she’s their friend and they naturally include her in all their activities. Perceptions are changing.

“There is hope. It makes you want to move ahead and go further. It’s no longer related to my son. It’s no longer: ‘Ali’s life will change.’ A lot of people’s lives will change,” says Abdel Wahab.

At the Care with Love training center, young women and men energetically move around the room. Some are getting ready to take an exam, while others gather around a trainer as she demonstrates how to bathe a patient in bed.

When they finish their course, these young people will be “home health care providers,” a profession that didn’t exist in Egypt until Dr. Magda Iskander introduced it.

Iskander, a radiologist who also has a master’s degree in counseling, had been volunteering at a drug rehab center in Wadi El-Natrun where she met a lot of unemployed youth, and at the Center for Geriatric Services in Nasr City, where there was a long waiting list. She saw two needs the need for unemployed youth to find work and the need for the elderly to find someone to care for them and thought: Why not train young people to care for the sick, disabled and elderly in their own homes?

When her sister was bedridden, Iskander had trained their mother’s housekeeper in basic nursing skills, and it worked. On a larger scale, this could provide meaningful work for many.

People said it couldn’t be done. The biggest obstacle was that nursing is not a respected profession in Egypt. In Iskander’s words, hands-on patient care is “an unwanted job, not prestigious at all.”

Determined to try, Iskander founded Care with Love in 1996 under the umbrella of the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS) and set up a partnership with the Center for Geriatric Services and AlSalam Hospital in Mohandiseen. Then she designed a four-month curriculum in which trainees study theory and attend demonstrations at the Care with Love center, practice their skills at the nursing home and hospital, and complete a one-month internship caring for a patient at home.

The program teaches them about hygiene, the body, common diseases, nutrition, housekeeping and daily care like feeding and bathing. The training also includes daily spiritual discussions, with a universal message for both Muslims and Christians, focusing on what it means to be compassionate, honest, positive and creative and how to affirm the client’s identity as a human being, not just a case.

“All religions ask you to be compassionate, to be giving, to care for the sick, to care for the poor, to care for the people in need,” says Iskander. By strengthening the trainees’ spirituality, she wants to encourage the idea that caregiving is not a job to be done mechanically but a vocation done for the love of God and humanity.

“Our main theme here is that we say you make a decision to love and you practice it until it becomes second nature This strengthens the feeling of the caregiver for the person in need,” says Iskander. “We also talk about choices in life, that I can choose to love what I do.”

A main challenge is to instill work ethics such as punctuality, sticking to what you know and respecting the patient’s privacy. In the end, says Iskander, 60 percent of the trainees are “wonderful young people;” 20 percent are problematic, but Care with Love continues to work with them; and 20 percent are dismissed.

When the first caregivers graduated, they were all employed immediately. “The demand was incredible,” says Iskander, and the program took off from there. Last year, Care with Love registered as an NGO, so it is now a stand-alone organization with two training centers and an employment office that handles calls from clients, administration, and finances. “We are a program that’s growing into an organization fast,” says Iskander, whose main goal for 2005 is to be self-sustainable and not rely on donations.

Iskander spent long nights with friends brainstorming a financial model that would allow her to cover training costs and keep caregivers “on the shelf” ready to work when clients call. Caregivers receive a base salary of LE 250 a month whether they work or not, with an additional amount added for the number of hours they put in and the difficulty of care required. The client pays Care with Love, which deducts training and administrative expenses before giving the caregiver his or her wage. Caregivers sign a two-year contract, so that by the end, Care with Love has recovered the cost of their training.

This is because training people and keeping them on standby is not cheap and neither is the service, with clients paying a range from LE 600 to LE 2,000 per month, depending on the type of care needed. When people ask, “What about poor people who need help?” Iskander answers, “I am helping poor people by employing them,” and explains that one of her main goals is to help youth who don’t have the support to develop themselves or their lives.

“Some people come from a background where they don’t have self-worth They come from crowded homes where nobody really gave them attention,” says Iskander, who also aims to build their characters, self-esteem and self-respect. “I tell them, ‘If you respect yourself, you force people to respect you.’” As a result, the job that nobody wanted becomes accepted and youth bring their family and friends in for training.

Through exhaustive interviews, Iskander recruits everyone from adult literacy graduates to university degree holders. The requirements are that the candidate be literate and ready in mind, body and spirit to be a home health care provider. Graduates not only become caregivers, some become instructors for the program. When Iskander first said that she planned to turn her graduates into trainers, people told her, “Oh no, no, you’re dreaming. They’re young and they’re not educated.”

“They are brilliant trainers,” says Iskander. “The good thing is that some of them went back, finished high school and went to college. Because [they] have so much self-worth, they want to

better themselves.”

People who are amazed at what Iskander has accomplished tell her these are “American ideas,” which amuses her because, although she did her medical internship and master’s degree in the States, she grew up near Assiut in Upper Egypt. “My motivation comes from within,” she says, and credits her upbringing and “enlightened parents,” who encouraged “doing” things and independent thinking.

“This is one of the best things I’ve done with my life,” says Iskander, who plans to franchise Care with Love in Alexandria and dreams one day of having a comprehensive service providing meals, laundry help, cleaning and transportation assistance for people confined to their homes.  et

The National Association of the Deaf, 1 Awlad Hassan Bakr St., off Abdel Hameed Meky St., Hadayek El-Maadi. Fax: 523-2804

The Baby Academy, 69 El-Montazah St. Heliopolis. Tel: 633-1529, (012) 226-66999 El-Fawakeh St., Mohandiseen. Tel: 337-9098, 760-8480 www.thebabyacademy.com

Care with Love, 44 Talaat Harb St., Downtown. Tel: 578-7573/94, (012) 398-0195, (012) 398-0196