CAIRO: Engineering students from the American University in Cairo (AUC), Bassma Taher and Samar Sultan are the first Egyptians selected as Dalai Lama fellows for the year 2012, winning $4,500 each for their project Kaab Dayer, which aims to empower underprivileged people by developing their interpersonal skills and enabling them to start their own small business ventures. Both students will travel to attend the Global Learning Community institute in California from June 17 to 24, along with other awardees, to present their project and share their knowledge.
The “compassion-in-action” projects that are designed and launched by students as part of the Dalai Lama fellowship should be in one of four areas: environmental sustainability, violence mitigation, interfaith or intercultural cooperation, and diminishing poverty. With Assistant Professor Ayman Ismail as their faculty mentor, Sultan and Taher focused their project on the production of leather goods, an industry that is suffering from extreme decline.
“The idea behind our project is to revive the industry of producing leather shoes and bags, which is in decline due to the lack of qualified labor,” said Taher, who majors in construction engineering. Taher and Sultan plan to establish a factory in Ain Al Sira, one of the poorest areas in Cairo, and make use of qualified labor to train unemployed youth in the area. “There is a great number of unemployed people in Ain Al Sira because of the absence of localized businesses and the low wages,” Taher said.
Sultan, a mechanical engineering student, added that one of their project’s main goals is to enhance civic engagement. Through their initiative, Taher and Sultan believe that they can revive a diminishing industry, create job opportunities and spread a sense of social responsibility among their fellow students. “We are encouraging university students from fields such as accounting, marketing, human resources, finance, branding and technical supervision to join us as interns in the factory,” Sultan said. “They will gain work experience, receive internship certificates from the factory and become more engaged citizens of Egypt.”
The initiative is a result of a partnership between AUC’s John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement and Dalai Lama Fellows organization. The selection process for the fellows was managed by a committee headed by Barbara Ibrahim, director of the Gerhart Center, and Nelly Corbel, University-based civic engagement manager. Corbel will coach the two winning students throughout the implementation process of their project. Taher and Sultan, who initially met at the 2010 Women to Women conference in Boston, are expected to complete their project in three years.
Dalai Lama Fellows is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that has the unprecedented authorization of the 14th Dalai Lama to award fellowships and project grants in his name, with mentoring and coaching components. The organization cooperates with various educational institutions, including Princeton, Stanford and McGill universities. Fellows are immersed in a yearlong secular, contemplative leadership curriculum that emphasizes mindfulness, compassion, ethics, systematic thinking and project management.