On the wall of a shelter home in Cairo. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS.

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, May 5 2014 (IPS)

Leila*, 19, has a soft, rasping voice and sad eyes. Her face is striped with long scars but nothing in her neat appearance hints that for the last nine years, her ‘home’ has been the streets just north of downtown Cairo.

Using her words sparingly, Leila tells IPS she was just a child when she was raped by her father. Called a liar by her mother and rejected by the rest of her family, she only escaped the beatings that followed by joining the growing ranks of young women who live on Cairo’s dangerous streets.She wants a little empathy for a life she didn’t want and one she hopes her son will never experience.

Life on the street was not easy. Leila endured violence, sexual attacks, police harassment, and rejection by employers when they discovered she was homeless.

Last year it seemed she might be able to leave that life behind after meeting a young man from Sharkeya province in the Delta region. They wed using a form of Islamic marriage not recognised by the state and which is easily ended, but which allows a couple to live together.

Leila became pregnant and the man’s mother threw her out of the house. When she pleaded to her husband for help, he rejected her and the baby.

Leila’s story is all the more horrifying because it’s becoming increasingly common, although there’s no hard data to show many young women are in the same position.

Hend Samy runs a drop-in centre for homeless mothers in the poor suburb of el-Malek el-Saleh for NGO Banat al-Ghad, commonly known as ‘Banati’ or ‘My Girls’.

Photographs and children’s pictures have been hung on the walls, that are painted in bright colours. When IPS visited smears of breakfast were still being scraped from a big dining table. Happy, shrieking children commandeered the floors and stairwells.

Samy, like all sources IPS spoke to, had noticed an increase in the numbers of girls – and later, girls with children – living rough since 2011.

In 2009, a National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) survey said Egypt had 5,299 street children generally. But in 1999 the General Egyptian Association for Child Protection, an NGO, put the figure at two million.

NGOs such as Banati, Plan Egypt and Hope Village provide much needed legal, medical and social support to street mothers. Government organisations such as the NCCM and the Ministry of Social Solidarity have several programmes to meet the needs of street children. But there is little targeted assistance outside Cairo.

Shirley Wang, a researcher at the American University of Cairo, says that poor communication between NGOs and government services leads to duplicated services. She also says that few are trying to change the public perception of street children as “criminal” and “dirty”.

That perception is especially dangerous for vulnerable young women living in a society that prizes female virginity.

In Leila’s words street children are viewed “like they are dogs not humans.”

Nelly Ali, an advocate for Egypt’s street kids, gives an example on her blog of a 14-year-old girl she names Basma from Upper Egypt whose grandfather kept her baby daughter locked in a chicken coop to hide the “shame” of Basma’s rape from the neighbours.

Amira el-Feky, now based in Berlin, used to work with 12-18 year old girls at Hope Village. She explains some of the dangers of the street to IPS.

“Many girls in the street experience sexual violence in one way or another. Some are in an abusive sexual relationship, others get raped or forced to work as sex workers,” she tells IPS.

Drugs are seen by many as a source of relief. El-Feky said one girl would take painkillers because they would make her head feel “light and funny”, while another would take stimulants to stay awake at night and therefore stay safer.

Homeless young mothers are the most vulnerable of street dwellers, and they also have the least legal protection.

“They don’t have any rights. This is why there are NGOs calling for their protection,” Banati executive director Rania Fahmy tells IPS.

Fahmy worked on the 2014 constitution. She said there were two articles that would be good for street mothers: Article 89 which criminalises human trafficking and is a step towards protecting vulnerable young women from being sold into temporary ‘marriages’; and Article 80 which makes the state responsible for protecting children from violence and exploitation.

Article 80 also enshrines in law, for the first time, the age of a child. Fahmy said the Muslim Brotherhood government fought this in the 2012 version of the constitution as they wanted to legalise the practice of child marriage. Now a child in Egypt is anyone under 18.

The constitution states that identification papers are a right. Leila’s voice shakes with worry when she speaks of her three-month old son. He’s healthy, but underweight for his age – and he doesn’t have a birth certificate.

Without a birth certificate a child can’t access state services such as education or health care. Banati and Hope Village have legal units to help mothers get proper documentation for their children.

But Javier Aguilar, chief child protection officer at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says the latter had only managed to register two or three cases in the last five years.

Egypt’s laws governing children are “pretty good” and include community-based protection initiatives, but they simply not being implemented, he tells IPS. “It needs a tremendous effort in mobilising government resources.”

Leila spent half her childhood living on the street, so she has firm ideas what the government should do. She wants the state to shelter homeless people, and provide jobs, healthcare and education.

But more than that, she wants a little empathy for a life she didn’t want and one she hopes her son will never experience.

“I want to tell everyone that they should feel for us.”

*Actual names of mothers and their children have been withheld.

IT entrepreneur Marwa Sadek, the face of a new Egypt. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS.

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, Mar 7 2014 (IPS)

The group of buildings near Tahrir Square could be modern campus-style office space anywhere. It’s hard to believe that just outside the heavy steel gates lies downtown Cairo, the noisy, polluted and now troubled heart of Egypt.

The buildings are now a new IT hub called the GrEEK, after its history as a Greek school and its current incarnation as a technology hub, and are the intended nucleus of a rising Egyptian ‘Silicon Alley’.The possibility of disruption from Tahrir Square to business as usual at the tech hub is a continuing reminder here that Egypt is not out of the political woods yet.

The location was the chief attraction for venture capitalist Ahmed Alfi when he decided in 2012 to build an ‘ecosystem’ for tech entrepreneurs.

The campus is close to the junction of the main metro lines and just a few stops from the national train station. Alfi said residents of Greater Cairo and from many of the surrounding cities could be at the business park within an hour and a half.

Alfi has ten tenants already in the office space he lets out, and “four or five” negotiating space, he told IPS.

Rent for a 50-square-metre office can vary from 450 dollars per month to 1,500 dollars on the lower floors. To put that in context, the new minimum wage for public sector workers is 172 dollars a month.

Alfi is clear about his aims for the campus: to give Egypt’s engineers and scientists a place to build technology businesses and thereby boost the sputtering economy. “My interest is its impact on the culture of entrepreneurs and on the Egyptian economy,” said Alfi.

“I don’t feel a responsibility towards the restoration of downtown. I mean, there’s some, but I feel a responsibility towards taking the really, really smart kids here who aren’t part of an ecosystem and getting them to work together and get some dynamism to happen.”

Those “kids” are the much talked of entrepreneurs in Egypt’s tech revolution who are reimagining their country as they want it to be. They are educated, usually bilingual, and tapped into regional entrepreneurial and business networks.

Marwa Sadek, founder of the digital marketing agency 20 Uses, mentored start-ups in Alfi’s Flat6Labs business incubator for the last two years, and couldn’t wait to get involved when she heard about the venture.

“I wanted to be in a place that is a business hub,” she said, having moved into a fashionably spartan second floor office in January. “When all the companies move in, the GrEEK campus is going to be a strong source of economic activity.”

Not only has the exposure to other businesses expanded 20 Uses’ client base, Sadek will soon have all the facilities on site needed to run a business, such as meeting rooms and cafes.

Yassar el-Zahhar chats happily about the plans for his health food start-up to service the geeks on the new campus. “You can smell the success here,” he told IPS. “Being here makes me take the power from the entrepreneurs around me.”

But all the excitement and business acumen inside the campus are unlikely to benefit those working just outside the gates. Continuing political agitation in Tahrir Square is one factor that raises questions just how much positive influence will flow out into the wider community.

Sadek’s main problem is the proximity to the square. She’s had to postpone meetings “three or four times” in the last two months because protests made the campus difficult or dangerous to reach.

Sadek said this would not discourage her from working from the GrEEK. But the possibility of disruption from Tahrir Square to business as usual at the tech hub is a continuing reminder here that Egypt is not out of the political woods yet.

GrEEK seems a world apart from Tahrir Square. The downtown area is “full of nasty people,” said el-Zahhar. “You can’t walk in peace in downtown.”

That means business for his food outlet at the GrEEK haven. “This will be protecting you. Protecting the girls, protecting the nice guys… I don’t think downtown will make any use of us, we are here to make money not spend money.”

Across the road from the GrEEK, Reda Feuad sipped tea in his IT shop as he waited for customers. Feuad doesn’t see the upstarts next door replacing his long-standing relationships with clients around the country.

The generational and educational difference between Feuad and the GrEEK tenants was clear: where Feuad spoke Arabic only and connected with his Egyptian clients via phone and sometimes in person, his new neighbours have regional and international ambitions, speak two or more languages and are constantly available by phone, and email, Facebook and Twitter.

No signs of this are evident yet, but some expect the influx of smart, innovative problem solvers to have some impact on the downtown area.

Heba Gamal, managing director of the economic development NGO Endeavour Egypt, hoped it would revive the community through foot traffic and social interactions with “young, enthusiastic, excited” business leaders.

“I think the downtown culture will be affected because it will want to, I mean smart entrepreneurs will definitely come in and want to tailor to that new segment of clientele that is suddenly available to them,” she said.

GrEEK CEO Tarek Taha is keen to be a good neighbour and has commissioned local carpenters and furniture makers to renovate heritage-listed buildings.

“We clearly understand where we’re located and we want to have an impact within the environment around us… I know this is a really small incremental effect but it’s very important to us.”

A schoolgirl on Geziret el-Dahab island, Cairo. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, Nov 20 2013 (IPS)

The Middle East has some of the best and worst education systems in the world and they are attracting the attention of entrepreneurs keen to make a difference – and a buck.

Entrepreneurs are using internet and mobile technology to create products to supplement or even, as in the case of TAGUINI e-university in Jordan, supplant traditional educational systems. Start-ups like the Hilaal Animation Workshop in Dubai and Ibtaker in Palestine are teaching in-classroom courses and developing ICT education kits.

But business people and experts are divided over the impact these organisations could make, given the shortcomings of the Arab world’s education systems. Some are sceptical about whether these companies are worthwhile for-profit ventures or merely social enterprises.

Hossam Allam, founder of Cairo Angels, a platform to link entrepreneurs and investors, believes that education is a field for NGOs not businesses. Allam told IPS that all the start-ups he has seen are not very profitable with limited potential for local and international growth.

Co-founder of Cairo business incubator Flat6Labs, Hany Sonbaty, said private companies are only able to work on the perimeter of heavily regulated state education systems.

“Education is governed in every place on earth by the national curriculum and standardised tests so unless that changes…,” he told IPS, adding that the only thing outsiders could do was to give people the tools to educate themselves further, if they were so inclined.

But Jordanians Lamia Tubbaa-Bibi and Rama Jardeneh disagree.

They own Little Thinking Minds, one of a growing number of online business producing Arabic-language television programmes for pre- and primary school children, which, they say, is an area ripe for private sector intervention.

“Many children enter primary schools [both public and private] unable to read or write Arabic properly and have a very limited pool of vocabulary,” Jardeneh told IPS, explaining that too much emphasis was placed on children learning English.

She said that her children, who attend a top private school in Jordan, struggle because they do not have a wider English and Arabic vocabulary.

The World Economic Forum’s 2013-2014 Global Competitiveness Report ranked Egypt’s primary school system as the worst in the world, and its overall education sector was ranked 145 of the 148 countries surveyed.

Yet Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are respectively ranked 7th, 11th and 19th in the world for their primary education sectors, with Qatar being ranked third for the quality of their overall education.

“We wish to strengthen their language skills and enhance their vocabulary and introduce early reading as well so that by the time they are seven they enter school well-equipped,” Jardeneh said.

A May report “Unlocking Arab Youth Entrepreneurship Potential” by entrepreneurship training NGO Injaz al Arab highlights the flaws in education systems across the region. The report found that schools are focused on rote learning and memorisation rather than problem solving and critical thinking.

“Youth enter the transition from school to work without the competitive edge needed to secure gainful employment in a tight labour market,” the report states.

According to global entrepreneurship NGO Endeavor, 39 percent of  Middle East/North Africa (MENA) companies say their biggest problem is an inadequately educated workforce. In a region where over half the population is under the age of 25 and over a quarter of those is unemployed – this is a serious problem.

But entrepreneurs, like Lana Karrain, are also getting involved in career guidance and jobs skills training. Karrain is hoping to help reduce youth unemployment with her Jordan-based career matching and job skills training website, Fakker. It uses game-based software to show graduates where their skills lie and what they need to work on.

“Students lack communication and presentation skills from an early age,” she told IPS, adding that it was important for Jordan, especially, to invest in its youthful human capital because it had no natural resources.

Curriculum change is a touchy topic in countries around the world, but in places like Egypt it is a political one.

Deena Boraie, associate dean at the American University of Cairo’s School of Continuing Education, said this was partly because the government feared the potential for “tampering” by foreign parties, and partly due to suspicions that the private sector was trying to make money off state education.

“Because education is highly political … I don’t think it’s a matter of time, I think it’s a matter of the ability to communicate and … it’s very hard now for the private sector to penetrate the public sector,” she told IPS.

Boraie said private enterprises might be more influential in altering the education systems of countries such as Jordan or Lebanon because of their smaller populations of about 6.3 million and 4.4 million respectively.

In Egypt, with its population of 80 million, the sheer volume of students means a small change will not be very effective or visible.

However, the clear preference for online- and technology-based products and services will widen the “digital divide” between tech “haves” and “have-nots”, says Muhammad Faour, an education reform expert with the think tank Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut.

“The problem with online courses or training is you may be targeting a special class of students, because particularly in areas where children or students are poor they may not have access to computers or [the] internet because they cannot afford it,” he told IPS.

The end result is that young adults entering the workforce who come from poor backgrounds cannot compete with those who have had extra digital training.

However, the lack of enthusiasm from the experts is not deterring entrepreneurs like Tubbaa-Bibi and Jardeneh.

They agree it is very difficult to penetrate educational bureaucracies and get their books and DVDs into school libraries, but they are developing proposals to design a curriculum for children up to six years for U.S. Agency for International Development funded projects.

“We strongly believe [and we are in the process of] forging partnerships with schools, NGOs and other educational institutions,” Jardeneh said in an email.

“Our goal is to have our products incorporated within the curricula of all Ministry of Education schools in the region.”

As long as governments fail to provide the level of education they promised or that parents expect, private enterprises like Little Thinking Minds and Fakker will rise – out of opportunity and necessity – to address the shortfalls.

EduKitten founders Sarah Abunar, COO (left) and Rana Said, CEO (right); absent is Ahmed Galal, marketing. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, Nov 13 2013 (IPS)

Evidence is mounting to suggest women entrepreneurs are more common in the Middle East than in startup capital Silicon Valley, and some even say it’s a more supportive place for them to start a business.

Yasmin Elayat, an Egyptian-American born and bred in California’s Silicon Valley, told IPS she felt the ecosystem of investors, business mentors and other entrepreneurs in Egypt and the Middle East was more supportive than those in the U.S. or Europe when she began working out the details for her now-inactive media business GroupStream in 2011.

“It’s a more encouraging environment for women entrepreneurs,” she said. “There’s something else going on here, whether you want to call it culture or environment.”

Elayat, 31, said the only time her gender became an issue was in Europe during a three-month startup boot-camp in Copenhagen.

A male entrepreneur from Eastern Europe was dumbfounded to discover that she was not an employee of GroupStream, but the CEO, and on another occasion, after pitching the business to a group, a male mentor directed all his questions towards her male co-founder.

Elayat is one of a growing pool of women in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region jumping into entrepreneurial ventures, although it’s difficult to pin down just how large that pool is.

A recently released study by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) suggested women in MENA were the least likely in the world to start a business, with only four percent of the adult female population considered entrepreneurs.

However, a big problem with the study was that it did not include data from startup powerhouses Jordan, Lebanon, the UAE and Qatar (Israel was included separately).

In Jordan the number of female-led startups is closer to one-third, near the global average of 37 percent, and in Egypt, Hossam Allam founder of angel investment group Cairo Angels, told IPS that about half of the businesses invested in so far involved mixed-gender teams.

Moreover, in regional entrepreneur competitions the mix of male and female participants is similar, such as in the 2012 MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition where almost half of the competitors were women, as was the winner Hind Hobeika.

The number of women entrepreneurs throughout the region probably lies somewhere in between, at about 15-20 percent. To put this in perspective, the GEM study found 10 percent of the U.S. adult female population was involved in entrepreneurial activity in 2012, and five percent in developed Europe.

There are several reasons for the rise of the woman entrepreneur in the Middle East, and one is that the startup environment has grown up with them.

Not only have multiple business incubators and accelerators sprung up in major cities across the region in the last three years, but so have organisations and competitions specifically targeting women.

These include entrepreneur news and investment website Wamda’s ‘Wamda for Women’ initiative, Lebanese business incubator Berytech’s Women Entrepreneur Competition, the Roudha Foundation in Jordan, AMIDEAST’s Arab Women’s Entrepreneurship Programme – and the list goes on.

Other reasons are rising access to education, and opportunities provided by the internet.
The World Bank says more women in the Middle East now attend university than men, and GroupStream’s Elayat said that compared with her first-year computer engineering course in the U.S., where she was one of two female students, the gender mix when she transferred to the American University in Cairo was “about half-half”.

Co-founder of Arabic-language parenting website Supermama, Yasmine el-Mehairy, said that in contrast to the low numbers of women studying computer science and engineering in Western countries, girls throughout the Arab region were funnelled into the hard-to-enter university science courses because of good high school grades.

“Women are more inclined to work harder during high school, so it was easier for them to get higher grades, where men were more interested in PlayStation and football,” she said.

“It was natural selection for you to go based on your grades to the university that was more prestigious or do the majors that were more prestigious [such as science and engineering].”

The Economist’s Ludwig Siegele wrote in July that the number of women-led startup businesses could flourish further because the internet wasn’t inherently male-dominated and also enabled highly educated women to start a home-based business if, as in Saudi Arabia, her family might object if she went outside to work.

But make no mistake – the unique challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in the Middle East are vast, from the wearying day-to-day frustrations to deeply rooted ideas about a woman’s place in society.

The 2013 Wamda for Women roundtable events in Cairo, Doha, Amman and Riyadh illustrated the difficulties women entrepreneurs in these countries face.

Generally the difficulties were the fight to be seen an equals; a dearth of role models; the challenge of balancing family and work commitments; and male bias.

Fida Taher, Jordanian media executive and founder of cookery website Zaytouneh, agrees.

She told Chris Schroeder, author of Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East: “First, some men get intimidated by a strong woman.

“Second, others – and I will try to sound as proper as possible – think a business relationship with a woman should be a personal one. Finally, some men underestimate women in general, and believe that women are not capable of delivering good results.”

Sarah Abu Nar, 28, co-founder of Egyptian company EduKitten which sells Arabic-language edutainment apps, explained her real-life experiences of these issues.

They included convincing investors the two women would and could put as much time into the business as their male co-founder, and people telling them they couldn’t run a business because they needed that time to look after their home, husbands and family.

But she also had a solution, one followed often out of necessity by all the entrepreneurial businesswomen spoken to by IPS.

“Don’t waste your time talking to people, convincing them you’re good… Don’t waste your time doing all this, do your actions and then your actions will speak louder than your words.”

A fertility clinic in Cairo. Credit: Rachel Williamson/IPS

By Rachel Williamson
CAIRO, Oct 3 2013 (IPS)

The young couple inspecting Dr Bassem Elhelw’s Cairo Fertility Clinic knew what they wanted from him: a baby boy. They also knew they wanted the child by in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

After only four months of marriage they were already experienced at this game. They had seen two other fertility doctors, and the young woman had undergone two ovulation inductions to stimulate egg development.

Elhelw said that had his advice been to be patient and try less invasive procedures before going straight to IVF, the couple would have moved on to their fourth doctor.

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in Egypt have boomed of late. According to specialists such as Elhelw this is now a fertile area for practitioners in it only for the cash.

Doctors and reproductive experts say IVF treatments have risen significantly after the Jan. 25 revolution of 2011. "It's easy for the wealthy but fertility is too important for Egyptians, even the poor will ask for money to get it done." -- Dr Ashraf Sabry, director of three fertility clinics

Across-the-board restrictions of what could be shown on television channels ended with the departure of former president Hosni Mubarak after the revolution. IVF clinics in Cairo and Alexandria began heavy advertising campaigns following the easing of restrictions.

Elhelw said a profusion of “infomercial”–style television advertising is now reaching once-isolated rural provinces, and greater awareness was creating excessive expectations of what the technology could do.

But beyond such specific changes, medical personnel say the 2011 revolution and the turmoil since have created a new dynamic. With the revolution came a governmental vacuum and a societal shift.

“I think what’s changed now is an attitude to infertility rather than cases of infertility,” Elhelw told IPS. “Attitudes changed because in the last two years things were happening very fast. The pace of life in Cairo used to be very slow.”

Sperm counts among Egyptian men are already low, as documented by Yale reproductive researcher Marcia Inhorn in her 2004 study Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of New Reproductive Technologies: Male Infertility and Stigma in Egypt and Lebanon.

Inhorn told IPS that Middle Eastern women, besides, suffer from an above-average incidence of polycystic ovary syndrome, and obesity-related problems are a major fertility issue for Egyptian women.

These problems have been exacerbated since the revolution, medical personnel say. Unemployment and social tensions are driving a change that has put shisha cafes at the centre of the social lives of young men and women, leading them to spend long hours in smoke-filled environments. Smoking is a known cause of infertility.

“Smoking is hematotoxic, it’s not good for sperm quality,” Inhorn said, adding that at least 50 percent of men in the Middle East smoke.

Dr Ashraf Sabry, director of three eponymous fertility clinics in and around Cairo, said 60 to 70 percent of his business was from male infertility. He attributes this partly to cigarettes and partly to a rise in the social acceptability of young men smoking in shisha cafes since 2011. 

“It’s too easy to smoke,” he said. “These boys spend so much time in these cafes, they can go through two or three shishas at one time.”

He said unlicensed cafes were now common and it had become socially acceptable for young women to smoke shisha in cafes, as well as cigarettes, and young men and even boys were spending hours in shisha cafes where once they would not have been permitted entry.

Such factors are pushing more Egyptians into seeking medical help to conceive, medical personnel say.

“Our observation in the infertility centre in Maadi or the infertility centre at Al-Azhar University, where we have a public unit for IVF, is that the number of couples who are coming for treatment of male infertility is on the rise,” said Dr Gamal Serour, director of the IVF Unit at Al-Azhar University in Cairo and expert in Islamic reproductive law. He added that male and female infertility affects about 10 to 15 percent of Egyptian couples.

Regulation of medical treatments has not been on the Egyptian government’s radar since January 2011. A draft law proposed in late 2010 to further regulate aspects of IVF such as sex selection fell by the wayside.

Ministry of Health spokesman Dr Mohamed Fathalla declined to say whether legislation would be introduced to control fertility centres.

The sector is loosely supervised by the Health Ministry and the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, and guided by Islamic law.

With governmental attention focussed elsewhere, bad practices are flourishing. Expensive and unnecessary procedures are thrust on patients such as full IVF treatment where only hormone regulation may be required.

Elhelw said he had not personally seen many women physically hurt by other doctors, but these cases were not uncommon in his clinic. Sabry said he saw “a lot” of women who had been physically, mentally and financially hurt by reckless practitioners.

“I will be happy [to see greater regulation]. These cowboys are hurting our business.”

Sabry said he had refused egg donation in his clinics. The practice is forbidden under Islamic law, though IVF is not.

IVF was introduced into Egypt in 1986 and a set of Islamic guidelines quickly followed. Many were reassured that such treatment was not forbidden by religion.

But since then, calls for a dedicated national supervisor, clinic registration, doctor accreditation, and the draft law in 2010 have fallen by the wayside as Egyptians focussed on building a new democracy.

This also means the precise number of clinics and practitioners is unknown.

Dr Ragaa Mansour, one of the pioneers of IVF in Egypt and a director of the Egyptian IVF&ET Centre, told IPS that “there is no national accreditation specific to IVF and there is no body that monitors and follows up the practice in each IVF centre.”

Serour does not believe legislation is needed.

Such legislation would inhibit flexibility with new technologies, he said.

The cost for a round of treatment ranges between 6,000 to 12,000 Egyptian pounds (870 to 1,740 dollars) for basic IVF, and between 25,000 to 30,000 Egyptian pounds (3,600 to 4,300 dollars) to choose the sex of a child.

By developed world standards these prices are low but minimum wage in Egypt is around 730 Egyptian pounds (105 dollars) a month. Yet people find the money somehow, says Sabry.

“It’s easy for the wealthy but fertility is too important for Egyptians, even the poor will ask for money to get it done.”