As a personal rant, you can ignore the rest if you can tell this is off-topic from here. I spent a lot of time in Egypt, I have a former Egyptian spouse, and I

As a personal rant, you can ignore the rest if you can tell this is off-topic from here. I spent a lot of time in Egypt, I have a former Egyptian spouse, and I know many Egyptians. This country has so much potential, and it is all going to waste because variations of this story, kids struggling to even find time to invest in the sub-standard education they are provided, is common. Now, like a few other expats who studied there with me in 2006-2007, I was really upset post-revolution. As expected, people wanted to bootstrap a nation far behind. There were, like in other public sector jobs, numerous protests by education sector staff and instructors about how it was bad, and not improving. Keep in mind in the average university students are paying a few hundred gineh (Egyptian pounds) per year. As a result, even higher education is swampy messy of inadequate staff and resources like our worst inner city middle schools. And this is the top of education chain in Egypt. Of course, as expected even in the most developed nations (I was scarred and disturbed by local politics, jaded from my time over there as I saw more parallels over time), this was put on the back burner when it is crucial to improving the general state of affairs. Not that many will address that, because it is not politically expedient. No one really focuses on the education problem in Egypt. I know some people running companies there, if you can even believe it pre and post-revolution when internet cuts were common, web development firms. Egypt invested in, for its time, top-rate broadband availability in the region. It is one of the first Arab countries to have Internet backbone as part of the higher education networks in the 90s prior to the Zaki information economy push around the millenium. When I studied at the time, with everything else faulting, the Internet infrastructure, even for average consumer use, was surprisingly not bad. They even had cool joint degrees. If I had money to spare, I would have considered one. http://www.africabuild.eu/consortium/iti-mcit http://www.africabuild.eu/consortium/iti-mcit So there is great infrastructure and potential for the Eldeebs I know and knew, pre-revolution at least. The sad reality is that stories like this are so common in Egypt, it is crazy. No kid, even the most motivated, cannot be expected to fight for enterpreneurship when he cannot eat and must work side jobs so his whole family can survive. Education, even when kids can get access, is terrible, in spite of great telecom infrastructure that was part of a perceived information economy bump in the future. I generally think Ahmed Zuweil, a famous Egyptian technocrat and Nobel Chemistry Prize winner, is somewhat an asshole. But he used to run ads during Ramadan on Egyptian television the last few years underlining education is THE priority to make Egypt return even to a fraction of its true greatness. If anyone thinks Eldeeb's story is moving, please look into orgs like this and many other Egyptian NGOs invested in education. Lord knows I do. http://www.zewailcity.edu.eg http://www.zewailcity.edu.eg