Finish the Egypt draft report

Workspaces Future Makers
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We need to finish this document. To do:

  1. Confirm the general overview. This is done by finding and referencing at least one recent Egyptian govt strategy document on entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. 
  2. Go through the workshop documentation and write a summary post reporting on it.
  3. Find Egyptian case studies to argue that there are, in Egyptian society, impressive examples of self-organized grassroots initiatives having real impact on employment, social inclusion, data.
  4. Ask UNDP for material on the street design initiative in Giza and review it. 

Please, do all this by Thursday 11th June. I am meeting Elena and Alexandra in Bonn next Monday and would like to be able to show progress. frown

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Status

1. Done

  1. Done

  2. Might be a bit short notice to deliver a proper case study. I’ll see what I can do.

  3. Done

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Sent

Hi, it was a bit messy, documentation spread over emails and hard disk. Spreadsheet for compiling it all in one place plus actual documentation shared with you now.

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2. Summary Post of Documentation

—DRAFT—

The obvious thing: The Documentation is varies greatly in quality, with the overall level being quite low. Most documented projects either are, or indirectly lead me assume, that they are dreams that have not yet been put into practice / pursued by their owners.

I will roughly group most ideas under the following categories: Education, Accessibility for the Disabled, sharing economy platforms, cultural initiatives.

Honestly, I must say that I feel the documentation to be too weak a base to start from. @Alberto I can’t write a proper summary of the documentation, there is little to summarise. It is all very light on info once you get past the self-marketing/envisioning talk. I always feel I’m running the risk of writing my own thoughts as a summary, rather than actually citing the documentation. Perhaps this should be taken as an indication for a change in approach in the upcoming workshops?

List of Documentation

1 Like
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1. Government supporting references

EDIT: Addedd TIEC (Government Incubator) Strategy Paper

TIEC Strategy paper:  Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship Strategy Link

This strategy paper is long with 142 pages and probably outdated: It was published April 2011 and outlines a strategy till 2014.

The details of the paper are very leafy and somewhat detached theoretical wishes (Flexible hiring, implement IP etc.).

I quote from the executive summary (Emphasis mine): 

“Egypt’s ICT sector has become one of the key drivers of economic and social development. It has also become a role model in Egypt, in terms of pace and policies of deregulation and privatization, as well as a catalyst for reform in other sectors, contributing significantly to the abovementioned successes in the Egyptian economy. In addition, Egypt’s ICT sector has become a fundamental pillar in social development efforts, through a unique and distinguished experience of public-private partnership (PPP).”

National ICT-Strategy 2012-2017: Towards a Digital Society and Knowledge-based Economy Link

This paper is produced by the MCIT (Ministry of Communications & Information Technology) and is mainly about expanding the reach of ICT in Egypt (i.e. more broadband internet, getting schools online etc.) and developing the ICT sector. It is quite technical and doesn’t touch on entrepreneurship that much; i cite it for two reasons:

  1. A lot of meetings where with MCIT affiliated organisations, so this provides the strategy guiding them.
  2. Section 4: Developing Relevant Legislation, which discusses the proposed freedom of information and cybersecurity draft laws.

MCIT Digitial Economy 2014 presentation Link

This presentation is quite long, so I mention the only pages I deem interesting:

Page 30: A table outlining budget allocations for 20 Strategic Business Plans (SBP), showing basically the relative importance of each. Innovation and Entrepreneurship are one such SBP

Page 37: Very ambitious goals for educational system developemnt

Page 58: The Innovation & Entrepreneurship strategy, outlining quantitate targets for 2020 (i.e. 1000 startups)

Page 71/72: For the Legal frameworks

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is how much the MCIT budgets for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship SBP, compared to the 19 others: It plans to invest just 1.2% of its entire budget in it, and estimates total investment in the sector to reach 6.4% of total investment in ICT. It hopes for "Attracting a USD 1 Bn of FDI and contributing an economic value

added of over USD 10 Bn"

There is no methodology listed for these numbers.

I contacted TIEC for their strategy paper, lets see if they respond. Meanwhile, here is the Project Document for TIEC itself, which was funded initially by UNDP money!

I could not find any other government sources for entrepreneurship support.

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​This is a USAID entrepreneurship draft and undated report. I don’t know wether it has any value, to be frank. Another one of questionable value

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​Perhaps I should try to contact Ashoka Egypt and Nahdet el Mahrousa for more info on Social Entrepreneurship?  Both are incubators for social initiatives here in Egypt, and would sure contribute some to case studies/the argument for social entrepreneurship in Egypt?

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4. UNDP workshop / street design challenge

Nami was kind to share 3 workshop reports with me this morning. I have uploaded them to a dropbox folder here.

I am burning out a bit, so am/will be taking things slowly for a small while. I’ll still attend the community call/ host the egyptian local call this saturday; but will only start properly working towards the case studies at a later date. Please confirm weather that is ok. @Alberto @Nadia

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Almost there

@Hegazy, your last comment happened a week ago. Are you recovered from your exhaustion?

Excellent work, by the way. I think we are almost there. Your remarks on the weakness of the stuff that came through the workshop are well noted, and @Nadia shares them. No further research is needed other than that on concession as a legal institution, and of course that on case studies (which will be ongoing). As for the social entrepreneurship incubators, for the moment just let’s note they exist. Next week you should reach out to them, but without investing too much in them: just look at the websites, try to determine how much traction they have, write to them asking for a phone call or some info. If this turns out interesting results (like “edgy” attitude or good numbers) we’ll follow up.

Meanwhile, I rewrote the Egypt mission report. What I am asking you now is to integrate your remarks into that document, by the beginning of next week. The links to government documents should go as a bullet point list into the final section (Useful links…). The place where to insert the workshop outcome and the Giza story are clearly marked. About that: did not either you or @Hazem mention a minister who has urban planning background? Or am I dreaming?

Hegazy, to change the status of a task do this: click on “reply” or “add a comment” or whatever. The editing window of the comment appears. Above the “subject” field you have status variables for the task: Date, Assign to… and Status. Change the status to “done” or “in progress” through the drop-down menu, then write a few words of comment (it cannot be blank), then click Save. This tells the database the task has changed status.

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@Alberto Yes, thank you. I have been back since Monday, in fact :slight_smile:

Regarding the minister, yes: Prof. Dr. Khaled Zakaria currently Giza Governor, was Former Vice Dean for Faculty of Urban and Regional planning, Cairo University

  • Done:             Links are integrated
  • Need Input:    Workshop outcome → I am unsure, what do you think?
  • In-Progress:    I will contact Mustafa & write a brief paragraph outlining his prelimanry efforts of reclaiming the public space using investors.  

I know for a fact that Nahdet el Mahrousa is pretty active and delivering. I will contact them and try to create a full case study of their work. Especially, as I am sure they will mention more information about that social ecosystem in Egypt (Mercy Corps, Synergos etc.)

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More on workshop outcome

I was thinking of a simple list of participants. For each participant: initiative; status of the initiative; description (if available).

The status of the initiative variable is key. Anything at the idea stage, we don’t look at. Already deployed initiatives we scan, and look for interesting stuff. If we find anything interesting, we might try to get in touch with the people driving them.

In the report, we will write something like: “we had 60 people and 45 projects, 30 of which where at the idea stage. The others were clustered around the following themes […]”. And then something about their potential to stay up and be autonomous. Once you are there, I will do the rest.

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1. Done

2. Done

3. Done Case Study: Nafham

4. Done

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Where do I find the workshop writeup?

Thanks, @Hegazy. Where do I find the workshop writeup?

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@Alberto

The Cairo visit data is on Google Drive here. The workshop raw submitted notes are here. I just created this folder now: It was stored by me locally, and is entirely assembled from notes passed to me by  @Nadia.

The list of participants is here.

The first sheet is what participants typed at registration with their own hands.

The second sheet is an incomplete attempt at copying the notes (shared with us by participants on nadia’s HD & e-mail) into the sheet.

The third sheet is a complete attempt at the same, sans the copying of the user written notes, but:

  • Description: is a very brief description I wrote, based on what I inferred from the notes
  • Grouping: is a somewhat arbitrary grouping scheme I created, where I renamed each submitted document (Which was supposed to cover 3 stories) into a group to link the raw particpant-generated notes with the sheet
  • Unverified Assessment: is an unscientific personal assessment by myself over the status of the initiative so far. It is not based on any methodology and not verified with participants (whom we didn't contact). Hence I stopped midway. 

This was all done perhaps a week or so ago, way before this new request.

I was still planning to perform some cleanup on the sheet, but we lack some essential information. I.e. the true status of initiatives and so. Where to go from here?

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Finish it

You are right on track. Just finish your third sheet! When you have no information, leave a blank. Then fire out an email to everyone saying “this is what we are seeing, can you confirm we are right or correct us?” Anyone who does not reply, we mark them as “not interested”.

When that’s done, you’ll be left with a few interesting people and initiatives that we can follow up with. If we are lucky there will be three or four. This allows us to wrap up the workshop.

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There you go :slight_smile:

Check the updated workshop participation sheet here. I created a new tab called “Cairo: Participants edited”

We have a data quality problem.

Having mentioned that, this sheet is the most complete list we have: A hybrid between the registration sheet and the notes submitted in groups. (Some participants did not appear in both lists!) Here is my methodology of work:

  1. All participants without a project (Mostly from the government) were removed to a new separate sheet
  2. All Rows have at least the following information: ​Participant Name, E-mail address, Project Name (In English or in Arabic), Project Maturity Status and an English Project Description.
  3. The English Project Descriptions are either supplied by the user or translated and abbreviated from an arabic description/group notes by myself. 
  4. All participants whom we could link to a set of Documentation have been identified: The Documentation column refers to their a posteriori given group name, which in turn is the document name in the Google Drive. 
  5. The Project Maturity column is either: Unspecified, Idea Stage or Deployed. I inferred the choices based on personal knowledge, the documentation and the participant-suplied description, and did so quite conservatively. 
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Some statistics:

We have 46 participant projects, where Unspecified are 30, Deployed  are  13 and Idea Stage are  3. 

@Nadia I will take you up on the offer to send the e-mail. I am still unsure of its contents, so please cc me. @Alberto, does that do? 

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Closing

Done.