Ingy Amin Mohamed, Egypt

Advancing the Dreams of Egypt's Women and Girls

Ingy Amin Mohamed made a special trip to pay 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.

Ingy now works for the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW). 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.

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.”

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.

Ingy is one of CEDPA's more than 5,200 training alumni in over 150 countries worldwide. Learn more about CEDPA's training workshops