The inspiration to start Educate-Me came when founder Yasmin Helal, a 25-year old engineer, was walking in old Cairo. “Three kids asked me for money and I happened to have three school bags with me for an unrelated reason. I decided to give them to the kids.”
“A man then approached me for school bags for his children and I returned the next day, which is when he told me he had had to take his children out of school because of the expenses.”
After following up on his story, Helal agreed to sponsor the man’s children and send them back to school. “After that I went to a local NGO and figured out the best way to infiltrate the area and that is how we made contacts and started our own project, which we called Educate-Me.”
This is how Helal’s initiative to finance kids to go back to school was born, but it has since expanded into an organization that provides informal education as well.
Educate-Me provides a range of educational services including early childhood education, after school programs, education scholarships and adult education programs. Since its founding in 2010, the learner-centered organization has provided students with the opportunity and freedom to aspire to what they dream of becoming.
“In Egypt, there are kids in fifth grade that are still illiterate,” says Aya Yasser, Educate-me’s Business Development Manager. “So our model is more about developing skills rather than knowledge, to enable them to learn more about themselves and what they want to become, focusing not only on literacy, but also communication and creative thinking,” she said. Their community center, located in Talbeya, Giza, is a growing hub where its 17 members and over 70 volunteers help young Egyptian students learn topics, from math to fashion design, that match what they can actually do.
To fully understand what Educate-Me does, one must understand its philosophy. In addition to sponsoring kids to go back to school, Educate-Me has five programs; Ask, Cog, Know, Nurture and Play.
“We do not see education as a means to an end, like a job or college; education is something you do for your own enlightenment and benefit. Education is also not just academic; the world is not made of subjects you study at school,” Helal said.
After starting with character building programs and activities, the group, which had extended beyond Helal at that point, thought that instead of deciding what the kids should learn, they would ask the kids what they wanted.
“We thought ‘who says that what we give them is what they need?’ So we went and asked the kids, all between 7 and 13 years old, what they wanted to do and developed more goal oriented programs, such as Ask which is about the kids recognizing a goal and mobilizing them towards it,” said Helal.
“We let the kids pick between any of the five programs instead of choosing for them. We understand that if they do Ask, it is a longer journey, which is why we integrated Play, because many of them simply come for that reason,” said co-founder Amr El Sanalekly.
Know is about exposure to things that are not in the kid’s immediate environment, through activities that promote interaction with the world, while Play is simply about releasing energy.
So far the kids and the people who work for Educate-Me have been meeting on a weekly basis in a public garden in Zamalek where they can engage kids in any of those five programs, but the founders say a more permanent place is required. “If we are to use things that requires consistency and/or plan activities that use technology, the model needs a physical location where we can meet not only weekly, but daily,” said Helal.
Both Cog and Nurture will begin when Educate-Me opens their community center in January, 2017. “Cog is about developing cognitive abilities and what the kids want to learn, while nurture is about involving the parents,” said Helal.
Over the past 5 years, Educate-Me has grown from a mostly volunteer-based organization to a full-time foundation focused on education innovation in Egypt, with 35 staff members and over 50 active volunteers.
In 2015, Educate-Me decided to consolidate its focus on early childhood and primary education by phasing out its after school program and expanding its preschool program as well as developing a full-time primary education program, with accreditation by the Egyptian government to cover the national curriculum using Educate-Me’s student-centered learning model.
In 2016, Educate-Me welcomed its first cohort of primary scholars in grade 1, launching with 2 classes (30 students) in their Talbaya location on the outskirts of Cairo.
Educate-Me hopes to expand beyond the 200 children they sponsor to include 150 parents and 350 kids.
“We used to rely on PR to get the money out there, but now we have started dealing with a reliable donor base to get funding,” said El Sanalekly. Getting the funding is not the difficult part though, according to Helal; it is getting people to understand what Educate-Me is about. “The biggest challenge is to explain to people our vision and philosophy. Everything is easier from there.”
