SCIENCE & EDUCATION

The Great Mosque of Cordoba in Spain is the inspiration for the grand, domed entrance to the American University in Cairo’s new campus. Its architects wanted to symbolise the height of intellectual and mathematical achievement in Islamic civilisation.

But this new $400m, 260-acre oasis of sandstone, mashrabiya window screens and malqaf windcatchers in the 40-degree heat is also a hot spot of western credo: entrepreneurship.

An hour’s drive east of Cairo’s gridlocked streets, the Cairo desert campus is one of the first nodes in a network of universities and business schools that the US government is using to support and educate entrepreneurs in Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries.

It was to Cairo that Barack Obama, US president, came last year to announce foreign policy toward the Middle East and that promoting entrepreneurship would be the platform for encouraging economic, political and social change.

It was Egypt that Mr Obama selected as the pilot country for a new Global Entrepreneurship Program. Some 17 organisations have signed up to this US-inspired effort to educate Egyptian entrepreneurs – including AUC and Nile University and their business schools, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Egyptian Junior Business Association.

But it is a project that might have caused even the Pharaohs to pause. Throughout its history, Cairo has been a crossroads in the trade of spices, silk, incense and gold between Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Asia. But today Egypt is far from being a top entrepreneurial economy; the World Bank ranks it 106th among 183 economies in terms of the ease of doing business. More significantly, says Prof Azzazy, young Egyptians still hesitate to take the entrepreneurial path.

According to Prof Azzazy, the prevailing culture discourages entrepreneurship but exalts positions in academia or the government. It does not help that going bankrupt is still a crime punishable by imprisonment. “Parents in Egypt will tell you, I want my son to have a government job, it’s secure. Their children will say, I would like to start a business . . . but I might lose money. We need to change this.”

Full text of the article on The Financial Times website 

Photo from FT site.