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Advancing the Dreams of Egypt's Women and Girls   
Ingy Amin Mohamed — Egypt March 6, 2008—Recently, Ingy Amin Mohamed paid a visit to the Cairo elementary school she attended two decades ago. She wanted to thank the Catholic nuns. If it weren’t for them – for the sense of social activism they instilled in her, for the visits to poor neighborhoods that so intimately touched her heart – she probably never would have become a development worker, never would have discovered her passion, never would have found fulfillment helping Egypt’s less fortunate. The nuns at Sacre Coeur taught Ingy to care for people who didn’t grow up with the advantages she did. Ingy is now working to improve the lives of low-income families in female-headed households. They are people who live in squatters’ neighborhoods with no running water, no electricity, no sewer systems – and, often, no hope. Frequently, they are illiterate and have no knowledge of their legal rights. Ingy works for the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW), the first feminist non-governmental organization in Egypt to work toward the empowerment of poor women. As a senior donor officer, Ingy spends part of her time meeting the women in their neighborhoods and hearing about their needs, and part of her time in search of money to help them. She pays visits to foreign foundations, many of them American, and the corporate community, explaining to them what she sees as their responsibility to Egypt and how their contributions will help. With the money Ingy helps to raise, ADEW is able to offer the women microcredit financing, literacy training, health care, legal assistance, shelter against domestic violence and seminars to build their self-confidence, negotiating and decision-making skills, networking opportunities and gender sensitization. In order to have an impact and help women who have little exposure to anything beyond their impoverished neighborhoods, ADEW must cater to all of their needs, Ingy said. Literacy is a critical issue. While 83 percent of Egyptian men over the age of 15 were literate in 2005, less than 60 percent of Egyptian women were. The literacy rate is much lower in poor neighborhoods. “Boys are allowed to go to school, but not the girls,” Ingy said. “The girls, their only mission is to clean and to wait until they have the age of puberty to get married.” One of ADEW’s programs, called “Girls Dreams,” began after the chairperson asked a girl to divulge her dream. The girl’s response was startling: “What does dream mean?” “We try to simply let these girls feel that they are human, that they have the right to dream,” Ingy said. “When you go to school, you have the chance to meet people...The more you learn, you’re exposed. So you can make opinions and you can make choices.” Illiterate people, she said. “don’t have any exposure out of their house and neighbors.” Even if children attend school, they often can’t find jobs afterward, she said. Because poor people have so many overlapping needs, Ingy said that ADEW tends to all family members, not only the women. “Women’s empowerment will not be accomplished if the community is not taken into consideration,” Ingy said. “What would it matter if you bring a lady who has been beaten by her husband and you spend hours and hours speaking to her about her rights, legal rights and religious rights? After all, she will go back to her house and she will find her same husband beating her....You bring the woman as well as her husband, the woman that you want to educate as well as her mother-in-law. If you’re talking about social equality and gender bias, it’s not enough to speak to the mother, you have to speak to the father because, basically, it’s him who doesn’t allow girls to go to school.”
“The training was really, really interesting for me,” Ingy said. As a fundraiser, she said, she needed new concepts and tools. The workshop, she said, brought “new ideas, new methodologies and it opens your mind to think other ways.” In addition to knowing how to raise money, Ingy said she needed to learn how to communicate and best lead her staff. Ingy said she spends a lot of time researching new programs that will help her country’s neediest and attract donors. Most gratifying, she said, is when she goes into the field and witnesses the results of her labor – a woman who learned to read, a daughter who went to school, a mother who convinced her in-laws not to force her daughter to undergo female circumcision. She looks to their faces for a sign, a twinkle, a smile. “These tiny emotional facial expressions or emotional expressions are really the most rewarding from the beneficiaries,” Ingy said. “And it really, really counts a lot for me – more than statistics, more than donor opinion. Because, after all, this is whom we work for.” Read more about CEDPA's training programs. |
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