Alwan wa Awtar (Colors & Strings)

As founder of Alwan wa Awtar NGO (A&A), Kamel works closely with marginalized children. She strives to develop their skills, values and principles through experiential learning and using art as a social development tool. Kamel led A&A for 13 years and currently advises and supports in fundraising and networking.

Kamel started her career in the corporate sector then switched to development. She worked in the UNDP, UNESCO, and other developmental agencies. In 2009, Kamel became an Ashoka fellow.

Kamel’s previous experiences along with good management practices led to A&A’s winning of UN Women’s Guild Award in 2008. In 2009, A&A won the USA administration’s ‘Coming Up Taller Award’, for outstanding NGOs, and the Pan African Award for Education in 2013. In 2014, Kamel won the Takreem award for Innovation in Education, and in 2015 was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by the American  University in Cairo. 

We work in areas characterized by poverty, where most residents seem entangled in a cycle of economic poverty and social violence. Our areas lack access to communal spaces and quality educational services, with government schools being overcrowded, exam-driven, often violent and with minimal activities that support children’s personality growth. 

A&A provides a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment in its community centers, where participants engage with a variety of arts, culture, and non-formal education activities, in order to discover and develop their inner selves, develop their skills, get a lot of exposure and get to engage with their peers in a collaborative and supportive way. 

Our interventions restore each person's dignity and self-esteem, and weave threads of connections through community. Having worked with children and young people for 15 years, we have seen how growing up within a supportive environment is effective in developing well-rounded and cultured personas and citizens. 

A&A addresses under-resourced communities' lack of access to opportunities for self-development and acquisition of core skills to navigate and thrive in today’s world. We work in communities where quality education and arts/cultural services is non-existing. While enrollment in primary education in developing countries has reached 91%, 57 million primary-aged children remain out of school, including one in four girls (UNDP). Egypt is no exception, besides, the quality of education is very weak, students participation is often discouraged, and WENR reports on the ‘disguised illiteracy’ phenomenon where 30% of children in schools lack basic literacy skills. The problem persists, with 103 million youth worldwide lack basic literacy skills - more than 60% of them are women - and 6 out of 10 children and adolescents are not achieving a minimum level of reading and math proficiency (UNDP). 

This dominant social and educational environment contributes to the youngsters vulnerability and marginalization: low self-confidence, lack of ambition or hope, and limited access to opportunities. This is intensified with girls, who have to deal with many more social constraints, as to their activities, movement, mixing with the other gender, home chores, and expected future, and thus have little to no opportunities outside formal schooling.

A&A’s approach is to open community spaces that provide access to arts, culture and learning activities, in a welcoming and engaging environment. We focus on the overall experience of the children/youth in the space, as accepted, respected and trusted individuals, with a unique identity and potential. 

Today, we run three community centers in Greater Cairo, in urban and rural settings. A&A has developed six different programs to cater to the emerging needs of its expanding pool of beneficiaries: the Arts Program, the Community Library, the Live and Learn Program, the Montessori Child Corner, the Youth Program and the Psychosocial Support Program. Throughout its 15 years of operation, A&A has worked with 7500 children and youth, 200 mothers and more than 500 volunteers. 

On a typical summer day, centers would receive between 40 and 80 beneficiaries. Children would register in activities, come for individual practice, or attend a storytelling  session at the library. Children feel safe both physically and psychologically. They feel respected and valued, and they learn and have fun in the process. Mothers also come for a quick friendly chat with staff members, or for the “women dialogue circle” activities.

We operate three community centers located in marginalized areas in greater Cairo. Our main target groups are: (1) Children aged 7-15; (2) Youth aged 16 to 30; (3) Women and mothers. Our indirect constituencies are the Families of the direct beneficiaries and the community in general as A&A’s theory of change targets individuals in order to improve the community. Our Gender ratio is approximately 50% females, 50% males.

We adopt a participatory approach in design and management of activities, which translates into high ownership. Our activities follow a seasonal planning cycle which starts with the evaluation of the previous season by the beneficiaries. With the youth and mothers, the planning of  activities also take place in a participatory manner. Some beneficiaries volunteer to facilitate sessions and organize events. 

We have witnessed how the arts have developed the expressive abilities and self-confidence of our participants. In Mokattam, where we have been operating for 15 years, we observed how girls now have more space to participate in activities. Youth have more freedom for gender mix with less communal pressure than before. Mothers have evolved in the way they go about educating their children or dealing with their challenging behaviors. 

A&A works in communities with a scarcity of spaces where children and youth can develop their expressive abilities and exchange ideas to enrich their understanding of the world. Their lack of exposure, quality education, and skills development contribute to their vulnerability and marginalization and affects their future prospects for education or work opportunities. We counterbalance that by availing safe, accessible, and engaging learning spaces in both urban and rural areas that provide access to arts, culture and learning activities. 

We consciously work on the value and skills of inclusion/diversity, reinforced by our welcoming and participatory approach with everyone.

A&A opened its doors in 2006. However, the idea itself was fermenting in my mind years earlier, while volunteering with an NGO for women, with very little resources to support their families. Being welcomed into their lives, I came to realize that for real change to happen, start with children, but how? 

The idea presented itself in 2004. It came from the children themselves. French volunteers held a workshop for children. Initially, nobody wanted to join because of the language. After a great deal of persuasion, some children attended. Very basic arts/crafts activities were implemented, yet the children were overjoyed and more kept coming. Quite frankly, I was perplexed, why? Curious to learn more, I held discussions with the children. Evidently, they had no access to arts; not in their homes or schools. “I would love to learn guitar”, “I want to dance ballet”, their voices still ringing in my ears.

Yet, from what I saw, the children had an abundance of creative energy, albeit channelled in the wrong direction. They came up with the most atrocious pranks, now I understood why. Hence, the idea was born: using arts for self-expression and as a tool for social development.

My passion and strong belief in education is what initially got me into grassroots work. I answered an email of an NGO seeking help in children’s education and ended up volunteering with them. I worked with women, and taught English to their children. This gave me insight to their inadequate education. Not only were they memorizing without understanding, but also lacked critical thinking.

My daughter, on the other hand, was enrolled in a private school, and the comparison was baffling. I wanted the children to have the same quality education and extracurricular activities. I had grown attached to the community and it was the natural place to launch A&A.

A&A was a pivotal turning point for me. I have learnt a lot from children, youth and community at large. To date, A&A has changed lives of thousands of children, unblocking their potential and inspiring them to become agents of change. I’ve been lucky to bear witness to such transformation. It has brought me so much joy. Hearing their testimonies and enthusiasm, has lifted me up in difficult times and motivated me to push forward. A&A has become a safe haven, a learning hub for everyone.

I think three factors have helped me do the work I do and create impact. 

The first has to do with my approach to people, I do have an innate trust in the goodness of people and their ability to learn, grow, and contribute. I found out that working with people out of genuine trust brings out the best in everyone. With time, this led to the development of strong trust relationships with the children, youth and parents of the community where we are active, which is very important for our work. 

Then there is my participatory management approach and skills, which I developed through studies and professional experience. I studied business and psychology at college. Early in my career, I was entrusted with leading a small team, which was a daunting experience, since they were much older than me. But somehow I managed. My boss at the time said I was a good leader, I had rapport with the team. This set a precedent and served me well over the years. A participatory approach to decision making was employed from the onset of A&A. Weekly meetings for the entire staff were held. Updates, challenges, successes and any other topics deemed necessary were discussed with the utmost transparency.

Finally, perseverance is a personal quality I often resorted to. Patience was indispensable in the face of resistance, mistrust, financial and administrative constraints, governmental pressure, but also when faced with a frustrated child or rebellious adolescent.  

Egypt is a country ridden by social constraints and taboos, especially marginalized communities. Arts are deemed irreligious, gender mixing is frowned upon. A&A started work in this culture, gaining acceptance was no easy task and took a tremendous amount of effort. Nevertheless, we later reaped the results.

After the spring revolution, civil society was under scrutiny and A&A’s premises were shut down. The community supported us wholeheartedly - our hard work paid off. However, there were other hurdles to navigate in this time of total disarray and uncertainty.

I kept my calm and optimism, the team took their cue from me. I spent time resolving issues with the municipality and meeting the team to raise their spirits. Meanwhile, setting a strategy was paramount. The whole team was involved in an inspiring collective process to identify the required skills/positions for this critical time, especially that we had no more funds. The entire downsizing process was collective and extremely humane, because of the strong sense of team ownership and solidarity. It was distressing to let people go, but fortunately, most of the members came back later. Now we have scaled up, opening premises in new communities.

I believe my leadership ability is manifested in the second line of leadership that were created in A&A. From the onset, I have led the organisation with a participatory approach, with the idea of forming future leaders for the organisation from the community. A few years after A&A was created, we launched an internship program for the community youth. Today, 7 staff members were previously children in our center, of which 3 are in mid-management positions. Our “Youth Program” is now running a project on “participatory leadership” to prepare the community youth to take over the leadership of their own program.

For many years I found it difficult to distance myself from the leadership of A&A because the team wouldn’t accept the more classical management style that external directors brought to the organisation. In 2019, I was able to handover the leadership of A&A to a “Leadership circle”, a team of 5 young women who shared the organisation’s vision for the management culture, for which A&A is famous. I am very happy to be supporting this team from behind, and to see how my leadership style allowed many more leaders to emerge.

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Our work is considered innovative in many ways. First, it uses a creative and unusual set of tools to catalyze social change; particularly arts and culture based tools. These tools are too often completely neglected in the context of development and education in Egypt. Even organizations working in arts and culture usually put more weight on the end product than the process itself. At A&A, on the contrary, the various activities give children a unique possibility to explore their artistic talents and in the process develop their creativity and self-confidence. Second, A&A's development model is driven entirely by the needs of the target community, emerging needs are monitored and  continuously adapted into current and future activities. This is endorsed by the fact that A&A's premises are situated in the heart of the areas it serves; providing easy access to children and community members and maintaining regular interaction between both parties. Third, graduates from previous programs/seasons usually take active part in subsequent stages as staff, facilitators and/or volunteers which retains the know-how in the community beyond the organisation’s lifetime. Finally, we mobilize the abundant resources of the society at large to help develop underprivileged communities in Egypt, by engaging young professionals from outside the community in planning and implementing different social and educational initiatives in target areas. Besides, we enroll the support of different Egyptian and foreign institutions which offer diverse opportunities for underprivileged children and young people.

The ultimate change we aim to achieve is  “A society of free, responsible and creative individuals where everyone is accepted for who they are and encouraged to engage in continuous self-development”. In order to contribute to this we use two different strategies: 

• Individual approach: Providing learning spaces and building skills and capacity that lead to change on the individual level. Activities that participants engage with support their self-awareness, their self-confidence and instill in them specific values and the capacity to analyse themselves within their social context. We believe this in turn leads to an enhanced capacity for personal achievement and wider choices. Having a clear and critical image of themselves and the society surrounding them would raise their social consciousness and encourage them to engage with different social initiatives, which will contribute in an individual way to transform social values and rules towards a freer and more responsible society.
• Communal approach:  consolidating stakeholders relationships; A&A expects that activities addressed to the community such as meetings or joint activities with parents will create  broader and deeper dialogue with different stakeholders about different issues affecting the community and the children. These conversations should result in more trust on the stakeholders side in A&A social and educational roles in the community and in greater acceptance of A&A by the community. It is also believed that the more trust is built the more opportunities the children and youngster will have to raise their issues and increase their choice range. The aim of this line of change is to create a supportive environment for individuals to grow up freely and responsibly, which would help change social rules and relationships towards the desired change, a society which supports individual development and learning.

We currently serve 313 individuals through our Youth Program (47% males, 53% females) in Mokattam and 1056 children through Arts & Culture Programs (47% males, 53% females) and 62 mothers through the Psychosocial Support Program in our three spaces.

The number of beneficiaries that could be served next year will vary greatly depending on the available funds. We expect the number of youth to be fairly the same given the continuation of its funding project, while the number of children and mothers could go down to 30% of the current numbers given our projected decrease in funding.

Based on our current capacity and in light of our efforts to move towards a more blended form of learning, to include both home and online learning, we can estimate our yearly beneficiaries to be around 1000, with a total of 3000 over the 5 years - as many beneficiaries remain with our center for long periods of time.

Our short- and long-term goals focus on the following: 1) Sustain beneficiaries access to a space for personal and collective skills development through our community centers; 2) Develop personal and community resilience in the low-income communities where we operate, through providing access to blended learning materials and tools, complemented with psycho-social support services; 3) Develop a new financing model and long-term sustainability strategy; and 4) Strengthen and expand the current revenue model activities.

On the short-term, we aim at achieving a number of sub-objectives pertaining to each of these goals, which mainly involve keeping our spaces open, rolling out a blended learning model in one of our communities, and developing the financial and business model of our revenue generation arms. In the long-term, we hope to be able to independently generate enough revenue to  keep the community spaces open with minimum capacity all year round, while expansion in the activities &/or programs be linked to available external funding. 

We already adopt a highly participatory approach in the design and management of activities and involve the beneficiaries in the planning and evaluation phases. Within the next five years, we envision switching roles with the community in Mokattam where we have been working for 15 years, such that the youth and mothers currently participating in our programs take the lead in the planning and implementation of different programs and pull the required resources from the community while we maintain a supportive role and run specific technical functions. 

Funding is one high barrier that stands in the way of achieving our goals, and while we regularly monitor donor organisations calls for proposals and respond to relevant ones accordingly, the uncertainty involved about the acceptance/rejection and the timeframe of receiving the funds given all the administrative work required represents a challenge in terms of long-term planning. Moreover, given the COVID-19 pandemic, many local donors shift their priorities to support other causes significantly affected by the lockdown measures. Similarly, when we run fundraising campaigns, we compete with other charitable causes that the crowd perceive as more pressing that arts or education in the Egyptian context, such as feeding the poor and curing the sick. 

On the other hand, we face a different challenge with our income generation activities, given the team’s lack of the required business and marketing skills, and our distributed attention between community service provision and income generation. 

Like many other arts, culture and education providers, the pandemic has caused a significant disruption in service provision, and we are now rethinking how to safely resume our service, while maintaining healthy safety. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that the majority of our beneficiaries do not have access to the internet or computers and hence lack digital accessibility. 

Finally, the uncertainty of the legal ecosystem in Egypt for NGO work is another major challenge. The most recent law, while less restrictive than the previous, still holds lots of unclarities especially in the absence of its application decrees.

One way to reduce the implications of the financial risk is diversifying our income streams between revenue generation, grants, crowdfunding, and CSR funding. We also try to raise the public awareness about the importance of investment in long-term interventions such as education and support that by showcasing our impact on the individuals and communities where we have been working for 15 years.  

We complement the lack of business skills and experience by outsourcing relevant tasks to consultants, and seeking pro bono consultancy through our network and partners, while building the capacity of relevant team members. 

Finally, we are capitalizing on the awareness of the disparity in digital access exposed by the COVID-19 crisis and the change in funding priorities to secure funding to provide internet access to some of our beneficiaries and equip our community spaces with computer labs. This will allow us to gradually build a blended learning model to retain access to our beneficiaries, at times of lockdowns and social distancing, especially as we expect the COVID-19 threat to remain for a while in Egypt given the current limited confinement measures.

In terms of content design and implementation, we currently have close collaborations with two local partners, Makouk and ADEF (Arabic Arab Digital Expression Foundation). Makouk is one of the first play-based education organizations in Egypt that designs educational games, tools and services. We co-design educational programs and avail some of our content as open source on their platform for educational content “Mowazi”. On the other hand, ADEF fosters environments for expression and learning, enhances skills and develops knowledge tools to support and empower teenagers and youth. We facilitate design and planning sessions with their team, benefit from their support services to partner organisations (e.g. marketing support), and our beneficiaries take part in their educational camps and summer schools.

On the other hand, our Psychosocial Support Program is supported by two local partners we collaborate with Shezlong ( an online psychotherapy platform) and Dawar (an entity specialized in offering community art based therapy) whose consultants deliver individual and group sessions to our beneficiaries. 

We also have partnerships with several educational institutions, such as the American University in Cairo and many schools, which provide us with volunteers. We have a variety of partnerships with other civil society active in the non-formal education sector or the youth sector, with whom we exchange support services, learning visits, resources, etc. Finally, we have established many contacts with local companies who support us in different ways: in kind donations, volunteers, project funding, etc. 

A&A runs safe community spaces in marginalized communities giving access to arts, culture and non-formal education for children and youth. Through the space activities, our participants discover and develop their inner selves, develop their skills, get a lot of exposure and get to engage with their peers in a collaborative and supportive way. We adopt a participatory approach in the design and management of activities, which translates into high ownership by the children, youth and mothers, and work on the individual level as a way to affect change on the communal level. Our service is organized under 6 different programs: Arts, Community Library, Live and Learn, Montessori child corner, Psychosocial support program and Youth program.  

We provide our services for free to the beneficiaries, while diversifying sources and types of funding, between donor-based grants and CSR partnerships, space-specific and program-specific grants, national and international grants, and income generation.

Our beneficiaries come for different reasons. Most children initially come because they are attracted by the art activities that are otherwise unavailable in their communities. With time, they develop a deep appreciation for the space because of its welcoming, respectful and engaging atmosphere which contrasts with the traditional educational structures they are used to. As they grow, they develop a deep bond and sense of ownership which makes them continue to use the space as youth. Finally, most mothers come because of the change they see in their children, and because of the support network that is created between them.

We started diversifying our income streams a few years ago with a desire to gradually become less dependent on external funding such as grants and donations. This is being mainly achieved through our revenue generation arms; the External Unit and Beit ElKazmaron. The External Unit offers consultancy services for fees in our field of expertise and “Beit El Kazmaron” lodge in Kar Hamza is a rental space for NGOs, companies and schools to hold one-day retreats, camps, training etc. Moreover, we are experimenting with a different financial model in our Montessori Child Corner (Nursery for children aged 3-6), which involves an interesting social inclusive model as it integrates children from different social classes, as well as, children with normal and special needs. It offers a sliding paying scale for the fees based on what parents can afford, besides other revenue generation activities, such as a Summer School Program, a Family Art Corner and space rental in the afternoons and during the Corner vacations. Our current income generation activities and other cost-effectiveness measures combined can sustain activities/programs in our 3 spaces for 1-2 month, with an operational capacity of 60%. In the short-term (12 months), we hope to increase this time period to three month (1 season of activities), while in the long-term (3 years), we hope to be able to sustain the activities in our spaces for up to a year (3 seasons of activities) in the “Reduced Mode of Operation”. 

• Drosos Foundation - grant- is funding the Arts and Culture program till December 2020
• Oxfam Novib - grant-  is funding the Youth program till December 2021. 
• Total income generated by our different services for the past 12 month: USD 28652 (external unit + Beit El Kazmaron + Montessori Child corner)

The minimal operational cost to maintain our three community centers open for the next year is around 250,000 USD. This minimal means a “reduced mode of operation” to (1) run the spaces with 60% capacity, e.g. 3 days instead of 5, with 60% of the staff; (2) implement two programs, the Free Space and Library, instead of six; (3) delegate part of support work such as design and M&E to the spaces. The Free Space and Library were selected because they provide maximum accessibility to independent, personalized, and fun ways to explore many areas of interest and the former also includes arts and other educational materials for autonomous use with minimal adult intervention.

We hope to secure this amount by October 2020 to allow time for necessary approvals and planning. Since all our community centers services are free, we are looking for a grant to cover this. Worth mentioning that running all children programs in the centers - with full capacity - would raise this budget to around 450,000 USD.  Moreover, we are fundraising 110,000 USD for the Montessori Child Corner, while the Youth Program is already covered by a current grant of 150,000 USD for next year. 

On the other hand, we need 80,000 USD to develop and strengthen our revenue generation activities, where any return on investment is to be directed to support other operations. Securing this amount through impact investment is a viable option, however, Egyptian laws governing nonprofits work may pose some challenges in this regard.  

Our total expenditures in 2019 amounted for around 525,000 USD, while the current budget of 2020 amounts for 588,000 USD. 

We deploy different strategies to spread the word about our work, and promote our methodology of using arts for development, which has proven to be very effective in the different communities where we operate. Applying for prizes such as the Elevate Prize comes in alignment with this strategy, where the expected exposure and networking opportunities made available through the prize, would allow us to just achieve this. Moreover, the monetary award will definitely support our operations, as our revenue generation activities goals take time to materialize. Finally, the potential support provided through the Prize in terms of strategic planning and developing our financial model, is definitely an assist. 

• Fundraising and revenue model: 

We have been experimenting and struggling with our revenue model. We have many assets, particularly a wealth of knowledge and experience rooted in years of community work, which we translated into quality income generation activities. However, our business model needs revision to adjust to the reality of our team capacity and market needs. Also, our expenses are way higher than the expected income, which poses questions on whether or not this is the most suitable revenue model for us to adopt. Finally, we believe it would be good to have a long-term strategy of securing funds, in order to plan for the long term.

• Marketing, media and exposure: 

We are well networked and have good exposure only within our ecosystem of civil society and educational organisations, mostly in Egypt. Exposure in other circles will open doors for collaborations, funding and consolidation and validation of our model. 

We could make use of the following partnerships:

• Community-based organisations which have successfully transferred the organization leadership to its youth / community members. 

• Non-profits which have successfully built a diversified revenue model that led them to financial sustainability.

• Organisations which have successfully grown while maintaining a participatory management approach and culture. 

• Companies or donor institutions which would be interested in a long-term partnership for financial support.