How an Egyptian nonprofit leader is turning vocational education from a backup plan into a first choice

But Aleya Serageldin is determined to turn vocational trades from a backup plan to a proactive first choice. “We’re trying to counter the perception that vocational students aren’t winners and they’re here because they can’t do something else,” she says. Serageldin is the executive director of the Ghabbour Foundation, a nonprofit launched in 2017 by the Egyptian auto company Ghabbour. At the foundation, she oversees a network of vocational schools that prepare teens for careers in the auto industry.

Courtesy of Ghabbour Foundation

Serageldin is one of 366 women from 58 countries who have participated in a Fortune program called the Fortune-U.S. Department of State Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership. Since 2006, mid-career women from around the world have come to the U.S. to advance their business skills and learn from female executives who are part of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women community. In 2022, Serageldin was a mentee of former Northrop Grumman corporate vice president Mary Petryszyn.

Since then, Serageldin has applied some of the lessons she learned about marketing, communications, and more to her foundation. I was lucky enough to visit one of the Ghabbour Foundation’s schools on a recent trip to Cairo with alumnae of the Fortune-State Department program, which is run in partnership with the nonprofit Vital Voices.

I heard from teachers and students who are redefining vocational education. Rather than simply learn the basics of auto technician jobs, students continue language classes in English and German to prepare them to work for multinational corporations. They participate in art therapy and learn about entrepreneurship. Students, who enter the school at 14 or 15 years old, go on to work as technicians in auto shops, launch their own businesses, or pursue higher education at technical universities and engineering schools.

Of the schools’ 830 students, 120 are girls. The schools, founded in 2017, only admitted girls in 2021; its leaders were reluctant to accept female students until they knew they could find them jobs. School leaders spent four years convincing the employers of the Egyptian auto industry that girls and women would be an asset to their traditionally male-dominated workplaces.

Courtesy of Ghabbour Foundation

One 16-year-old student named Malak told us how she’s loved cars since she was young, but her mother was initially resistant to the idea of her pursuing an automotive education. An 18-year-old student, who trained in an auto shop, said customers would sometimes ask confused questions when they saw her in her coveralls.

With the first class of female students set to graduate in 2024, the Egyptian auto industry will soon have a more diverse—and well-trained—workforce. “They’re here because they excel at something,” Serageldin says of her students, “not because they lack skills at something else.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

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