Abstract
Over the last two decades, international development work in Egypt has focused on enhancing the status of women and girls through fostering agency and empowering communities. In 2001, Population Council, a large international nongovernmental organization, designed and implemented Ishraq (Sunrise), a 20-month second-chance school program offering literacy and life skills training to adolescent girls in rural Upper Egypt. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Egypt over a 3-year period, this chapter explores how Ishraq enhances the experiences of program staff and teachers at the expense of its former participants. Despite the agency and empowerment claims made in documents and by teachers and staff, Ishraq does not account for the historical, sociocultural, and structural conditions that have come to shape the experiences of girls living in rural Upper Egypt. This chapter also examines colonial-era schooling practices and their relationship to broad policy reforms in rural Egypt during the late-modern and contemporary periods. These historical and textual analyses illustrate how Ishraq’s advocacy for the reform of local “culture” affects the experiences of teachers, students, and program staff in uneven ways. This critical poststructural analysis of the research findings suggests Ishraq furthers the existing divide between rural and urban communities in Upper Egypt.
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Notes
- 1.
Law No. 126 of 2008 amended the provisions of the Child Act (No. 12/1996), defining a child as any persons younger than 18 years of age, and by extension under the age of consent for marriage (Al-Jarida Al-Rasmiya, 2008).
- 2.
The DAE serves as the primary governmental partner for all public or private programs working in the areas of literacy and/or basic education (Population Council, 2013).
- 3.
Youth centers are public facilities that operate under the direction of the Ministry of Youth and Sport, and are located in nearly every community (rural and urban) across Egypt (Population Council, 2013).
- 4.
The names of all study participants are pseudonyms.
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Sallam, M.K. (2016). The Last Great Hope for Transforming the Lives of Girls: The Rhetorics of Girls’ Education in Upper Egypt. In: DeJaeghere, J., Josić, J., McCleary, K. (eds) Education and Youth Agency. Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33344-1_8
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