The Last Great Hope for Transforming the Lives of Girls: The Rhetorics of Girls’ Education in Upper Egypt

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.