Magdy Aziz

Magdy Aziz is promoting gender equality in Egyptian society by teaching children about their rights and empowering them to exercise them. Starting in the city of Minya, he is working through the existing educational system to provide boys and girls alike a venue to express themselves freely while exploring gender-related themes, and helping them develop the skills and confidence to participate equally in school, and eventually community life. His “rights of the child” program includes parents, teachers, and education decision-makers as well, ensuring a cooperative and supportive learning process and laying the groundwork for long-term changes in social attitudes toward women inside and outside school walls.

Recognizing the important role the education system plays in creating and reinforcing gender disparities in every facet of Egyptian society, Magdy Aziz is tackling discrimination from the bottom up, teaching elementary school children what their rights are and should be, and how to demand that those rights be respected. Through “rights of the child” groups in elementary schools, he is introducing children to international and national conventions governing rights and giving them a safe space to practice exercising them in ways that can translate into their outside lives. By encouraging boys and girls alike to contribute ideas and take on leadership roles, the groups foster not only gender equality, but also political and community participation skills in what is traditionally a very rigid school system. In this environment, children are able to take ownership of their rights and, by enforcing them among their peers, become messengers for them.
To ensure that the lessons learned in school are reinforced in the home and spread to the larger community, Magdy created school committees that provide a direct link between school teachers and parents. Higher-level consultative committees of decision-makers at the local and national level then help the ideas spread to other schools, education levels, and government institutions. Magdy is also working with parents and government officials alike to promote implementation of laws to protect children’s rights and prohibit gender discrimination.

A recent United Nations Arab Human Development Report identified the severe gender gap as one of three major issues impeding development in the Arab world. Although Egypt has made tremendous strides in recent years to improve educational opportunities for women and has enshrined gender equality in its constitution, aspects of the law and many traditional practices still discriminate against women, and a significant disparity persists. In the People’s Assembly for example, women hold fewer than three percent of the seats, and the unemployment rate for women is more than four times that for men. Women’s employment opportunities are generally confined to government, social services, academia, and the arts, and social pressure against women pursuing a career can be strong. Some women’s rights advocates say that a resurgent Islamic fundamentalist trend could limit further gains.
The country’s educational system plays a pivotal role in disempowering women on legal, political, and economic levels by reinforcing their perceived lower social status from a very early age. The rigid and formal system relies on traditional educational techniques that effectively deny children their right to participate or freely express themselves, and bias towards boys is ingrained both in the curricula and in teachers’ attitudes. Also, despite a marked increase in enrollment of girls since the 1960s, educating girls is a low priority for parents in rural areas. Instead, girls join the labor force at a young age and marry early, cutting off opportunity for social participation or career advancement.
Most work related to children’s rights is isolated and easily overwhelmed by children’s daily experiences at school or in the home. Top-down approaches are the norm, and collaboration among students, teachers, parents, and local decision makers is sorely lacking. As a result, even well-intentioned policies very often lack the support or understanding of those whose lives they aim to improve. Magdy’s approach is unique in that it addresses both the children themselves, and the interplay between children and adults that is crucial for changing attitudes over the long term.

Drawing on his experience and connections with the educational system in Minya, Magdy established the Al Tanweer (Enlightenment) Foundation for Education and Development to launch the “rights of the child” program in 20 elementary schools, targeting children in the third, fourth, and fifth primary classes. Training teachers in children’s rights and a participatory teaching model was the first step. Magdy then formed a child rights group in each school, where 30 to 35 students of diverse faiths and gender meet once a week for two to three hours with two trained supervisors.
The goal of the groups is to teach boys and girls alike about children’s rights with a focus on gender equality and help them develop critical thinking and communications skills that will allow them to be active and equal participants in the school and the society at large. The children learn about international and national conventions and laws regarding children through storytelling, films, role-playing, and group discussions, and participate in art and writing activities that help them absorb and understand the material. Their work is then displayed at a children’s rights conference at the end of the year. Other activities include visits to other schools, and educational field trips.
The group curriculum developed by Al Tanweer includes elements of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the delineation of rights and responsibilities, violations against children, equality before the law, respect of other people’s rights, the right of girls to an education, elections, and democracy, cooperation, equality, tolerance, and peace.
In addition to learning about their rights, children are encouraged to practice speaking out and taking leadership roles. For example, children in the groups are asked to present problems that they see around them and then actively participate in the problem-solving process. One problem noted by children in Saft El Laban was illiteracy, so Magdy worked with them to find the funding to start a project to eradicate it. In another village, children said that the problem was the high rate of child blindness, so they contacted Maghraby Company, a sunglasses company, to get funding for a project to eradicate trachoma in two villages in Upper Egypt. Magdy’s schools also began holding elections to teach students about equality in leadership. After a year, girls represented 26 percent of those elected as class president and 72 percent of those elected as class vice president.
To ensure students in the group have a supportive environment in the school and at home, Magdy created six-person school committees to oversee the groups’ work at each site, made up of a principal, the two group supervisors, an active school teacher, and two parents. He also created workshops and trainings to spread awareness about children’s rights among parents. The school committees are in turn overseen by a consultative committee made up of decision-makers from the Ministry of Education as well as from the governorate of Minya and other relevant parties. Magdy included these diverse groups in order to foster a sense of ownership in the program among all the stakeholders in the children’s education, spread awareness of his ideas, and to see that local problems are solved in an effective, participatory way as they arise. He is currently working directly with 40 teachers, 20 principals, 544 parents, and 15 decision-makers from the Ministry of Education and from the governorate. In the next year, Magdy plans to increase the number of schools to 40, and is working to expand beyond Minya.
In the long term, Magdy hopes to implement his methods and approach to teaching on a wider scale in government schools, providing children the skills to think critically, participate positively, and to take leadership roles, with a special focus on gender equality. His work to this end focuses on changing the school curriculum to allow more student participation, and he is currently developing a conference for decision-makers to discuss changes in textbooks that will promote greater gender equality. He working with ten other civil society organizations in Minya to help spread his ideas, and has plans to build a Web site about his initiative to encourage modeling on an international level.
Magdy is also doing advocacy work outside of the schools to help build awareness of gender issues in education and promote the passage of laws that protect children’s rights. He has had success reaching out to officials by exhibiting the work of the student groups. In Minya, he conducted a campaign to encourage the community—parents, local organizations, and others—to participate in the decision-making process of the education system and to take a more active role in raising standards. Following the campaign, in cooperation with a research center, Magdy conducted a field research on “Community Participation in Education and on Activating the Role of PTOs in Schools,” which is being published and will be on display at the National Egyptian Book House.

Magdy was born in 1960 in Southern Egypt. His father was a French teacher and his mother a housewife who cared for him and his five brothers. From the time he was nine years old, he was an active leader, both in school and in the scouts. Magdy’s outlook on life as a young man was influenced by an Egyptian Catholic Priest, Father Moneer Khozam, who taught him how to participate in building his society and “choose” to think independently and out of the box. During school and throughout his university years, he spent his free time doing volunteer work in outlying villages.
Magdy graduated from the University of Minya in 1982 with a bachelor’s in education. He started his career as a teacher, but soon joined the Upper Egyptian Association for Social Development, where he worked for 17 years. He launched one of his first school projects during this time. Noticing that women brought their school-aged children to literacy programs, he created a nontraditional, parallel school aimed at child dropouts.
Working in the field of education and development for 20 years, Magdy saw that the number of male students was far greater than the number of female students. He also noticed that it was rare to see girls participating in sports, cultural, or theatrical events. In response to this gender gap he established the Al Tanweer organization and began a number of projects including the child rights groups and an effort to promote law enforcement protecting children.
It took nine months for the Ministry of Education and state security to agree to let him introduce his curriculum into 20 schools, in large part because civic education and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are considered political. Teachers and principals also doubted his intentions because of his Catholicism and desire to introduce new concepts like gender equality in public schools in remote villages in Minya. But he never gave up and worked with them until they were convinced.
In addition to his child-rights project, Magdy has worked on youth volunteering programs with other organizations in Minya, Cairo, and Assyut, a program to seek out and support child geniuses, school enrollment campaigns, and community-based energy projects, all with a special focus on gender equality.
Magdy is married to a secondary school professor and they have two boys. Bucking custom in conservative Minya, Magdy supported his wife’s decision to get an M.A. and took care of the children while she was studying.