‘Beginning Of A New Journey’: 2025 Dawns Bright At The American University In Cairo by: Marc Ethier on January 13, 2025 | 269 Views January 13, 2025 Copy Link Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Share on Reddit The state-of-the-art campus of The American University in Cairo, located in New Cairo. Its business school, the newly named Onsi Sawiris School of Business, is home to more than 1,500 students. It is the only Middle East B-school with triple accreditation from AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS. AUC photo Large gifts to business schools are often described as “transformative” by donors and recipients alike. At The American University in Cairo, Egypt, the word may actually be an understatement in describing the $35 million donation from the family of the late founder of global construction giant Orascom Group. It’s a gift that has given the business school not only a new name but the promise of greater change this year and for years to come. “I think it’s an incredible step forward,” Sherif Kamel, dean of the newly named Onsi Sawiris School of Business, says. “It’s going to make a big impact to the faculty, the students, the research, the projects that we do for the community — but also the operations of the school.” AUC Onsi Sawiris Dean Sherif Kamel: Name change for the B-school is “the beginning of a new journey, because this could also encourage others to support the school and its endeavor to scale its impact on Egypt and the region” A MAJOR REGIONAL & INTERNATIONAL PLAYER The endowment is the largest in the B-school’s history. It will cover scholarships for Egyptian students and faculty, research, exchange programs, partnerships with other schools, and a professorship in artificial intelligence and data analytics. But will do more than that, signaling, nearly 78 years after its founding post-World War II, that AUC’s B-school is a major regional and international player, one of only a handful of schools in the Mideast that merits inclusion in The Financial Times‘s global rankings. “I look at this as the beginning of a new journey, because this could also encourage others to support the school and its endeavor to scale its impact on Egypt and the Middle East and Africa,” Kamel tells Poets&Quants. “I also look at it as a collaboration with the Sawiris family, with the group of companies that work in multiple industries — including construction, including development, including real estate, including telecom.” The name Sawiris has long been associated not only with business excellence in these areas, he notes, but also with commitment to education and social development. That makes the collaboration, and the adoption of the Sawiris name by the school, a natural fit, “bringing the business closer to the business school and building a very strong bridge between the community and the business school.” As Kamel told the school community in announcing the gift and new name, Sawiris “reflects the values and aspirations of the school community and will inspire future generations of business leaders.” “The School of Business has always aspired to foster an environment where ideas flourish and leaders are nurtured. Many of our proud graduates hold prominent leadership positions in business, government, the public sector, and civil society. They are leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who make a difference. As we unveil our new name, we look forward to our next chapter with great anticipation. Our vision is to continue building a school of business at the forefront of academic excellence and industry relevance. We aim to equip our students with the knowledge, skills, and ethical foundation they need to positively impact the global business landscape. STABILITY AT THE TOP The Sawiris School possesses a lot of “only’s” — the only B-school in the Middle East-North Africa region with triple accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the Association of MBAs (AMBA), and the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS). (It has been accredited by AACSB since 2006, and by AMBA and EQUIS since 2014.) It is also the only MENA B-school to land a spot in one of The Financial Times’s rankings, reaching 73rd in the magazine’s 2024 open-enrollment Executive Education list. And it is the only MENA B-school to join the Global Alliance in Management Education (CEMS), a group of leading schools, multinationals, and NGOs that together offer the CEMS Master in International Management. Sawiris currently has more than 1,500 students in its undergraduate and graduate programs, including MBA and executive education programs, and more than 12,000 alumni in 82 countries. It also has its own startup incubator, Venture Lab, that has launched more than 370 businesses since 2013. One through-line for Sawiris from recent past tp the present: its leader. Sherif Kamel has taught a significant percentage of all the graduates of AUC’s business school — more than 2,300, he writes in his book, Leading Change in Challenging Times: Lessons in Disruption and Innovation from Egypt, across nearly 80 different management courses between his first teaching role in 1992 and his rise to the deanship of the B-school in 2009. He stepped down in 2014 to spend more time with family in Canada, but returned in 2018 and has been dean ever since. Now comes $35 million to remake the school in key ways at a crucial juncture: The school this year will begin implementing its strategic plan for 2025-2028, which includes various projects and initiatives focused on the academic triangle of teaching, research, and service — initiatives that will incorporate executive education and community development programs. Moreover, the school was recently accepted as a member of the Global Network for Advanced Management, an elite group of top B-schools, which will provide a wealth of opportunities for the school community. “It’s big news,” says Kamel, who became chair of the AACSB Board of Directors in July 2024, of the Sawairis family gift. “It’ll fuel our ambition to always scale up our search for academic excellence and more relevancy and timeliness to what’s happening in the marketplace, to be able to echo through our academic degrees, executive education and community development projects to prepare the next-gen of students and leaders to be equipped with whatever the market needs.” ‘FILLED WITH HOPE & ANTICIPATION’ Kamel’s second deanship has already been a period of great change. Despite the prevalence of conflicts in the MENA region and the profusion of challenges his and other institutions of higher learning face, he’s encouraged — “filled with hope and anticipation,” as he wrote in a new year’s message to the school community — for what lies ahead in 2025. “You look at the higher education landscape, specifically business education in the region,” he tells P&Q. “One hundred years ago there were two institutions. Just two. Today, I think it’s north of 1,000. Not all of them are at the same quality, that’s for sure. But then if you look at the demographics of this region and north of 60%, actually more, maybe 65% are under the age of 21, and the vast majority are not going anymore to law or engineering or medicine, but it’s all the intersection of business and technology, business and innovation. “Everybody wants to have a start-up. Not everybody is going to end up with a start-up or a successful start-up, but they feel that business and management education is the way to make a difference in society. “So the incredible growth and the demand has pushed more and more, not necessarily public universities, but private as well, either standalone or in collaboration with institutions from the UK, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the like, are not just opening up branches and facilities and so on, but they also have realized that with the exposure that the students have, they don’t settle with any mediocre quality. “So gradually they’re upping their game, because they know, ‘If you don’t offer me what I want, I’m going to go somewhere else.’ So I think the future of business and management education, and you look at even the statistics of the business schools that are even within the AACSB network that are getting accredited, MENA is the fastest region everywhere. Okay, granted, because they’re coming from behind, but because of the size of the population and the growth of the population, I think much, much better days are on the way. The potential is crazy.” See below for a Q&A with Sherif Kamel, dean of the Onsi Sawiris School of Business at The American University in Cairo. It has been edited for length and clarity. American University in Cairo business students. AUC photo THE P&Q INTERVIEW WITH SHERIF KAMEL, DEAN OF THE ONSI SAWIRIS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO I’d like to start with what you do at the American University and what it’s like to study there. Let’s start with how many European and American students you have. Sherif Kamel: So why don’t I give you a quick background history of the institution in Egypt, the best school, the landscape. So the institution where I work is called the American University in Cairo. We call it AUC. So it was established back in 1919, and the intention was to serve Egypt and the region. What we mean by region is the Middle East, North Africa. It’s based on liberal arts education. Everything is taught in English. So come next February we’ll celebrate 106 years in the business. The size of the institution is just north of 7,000 students, for undergraduate and graduate. And it has a number of schools. My school, the school of business, is just one of them. Just to give us sort of a scale to the size of the institution, we are relatively small compared to our competitors in the market, especially in Egypt. So in Egypt, there are 94 different universities. What is called Cairo University and Alexandria University, they have around 300,000 students each. So we’re 7,000 in total. So freshman year in the business school in Cairo University is bigger than the entire university where I work, just to give you the scale. It is a very large country, 110 million people. And growing at just north of 2% every year. It’s in the most populated country in the region. So countries around us are around 8 million, 10 million, 50 million, 20 million, and we’re 110. So that’s the university. And as I said, it’s all taught in English and has many partnerships all around the world, not necessarily in the U.S. But we are incorporated in the United States and the state of Delaware. And we have offices in New York. We don’t offer programs in the U.S., but we’ve incorporated there. We’re governed by a board of trustees, overwhelmingly American members. I can go back and forth between the school and the university. If I can zoom in to the school, the school started operation back in 1947 with the economics programs, and we introduced the executive education in the ’60s, management program in the ’80s. And the rest is history. What would you say to someone considering coming to your school to study business? Why should they come there? What’s the appeal to an American or maybe someone from Europe who’s considering studying there? Super question. So I’ll give you an example. Not something theoretical. So around 15 years ago, we introduced a series of programs that encourages people from outside the region to come and study in Cairo. So Cairo is a very busy city. You’re talking 25 million people. So it’s much, much, much busier than New York. And boy, the city really never sleeps. You can go and dine at 4:00 AM, you can go to the barber shop at 2:00 AM. It’s crazy. So what we did was a program, that if you want to come and study you’re not just going to study business. You’re going to study business, but you’re also going to have a bit of history. And at history, when you study it, you’re not just going to study it by attending a few sessions in the classroom, but you go and see whatever discovered in the classroom in real life, which is next door. And by the way, this is not just the pyramids. People always think of Egypt as the pyramids. You know how many pyramids there are in Egypt? The last number I know is 138. But the whole world talks about the three Giza pyramids, the ones that are famous. Then there are so many other sort of cultural heritage in Egypt that goes way beyond the Pharaohs, the Greco-Roman, the era of the Khans, the era of Islamic that is very much affected by the Islamic art and architecture, which is the old Cairo. So there are so many things. When we included that in the curriculum, we actually multiplied the number of students coming to our region from outside Egypt, from outside the region. The biggest population we get so far, it has always been American students. But then now we get Brits, we get Germans, we get French. We don’t get from the Far East. We’ve got Africans. We don’t attract the Far East, for some reason. The bulk are from North America and Canada and the U.S., and Egypt. We don’t attract people from South America, not really. But we are not where we want to be in terms of percentage of international students. We want to scale that up. But I understand, people when they think of Egypt, they don’t think of Egypt only. They think of the entire region. If you’re watching, I don’t know, Sky or Fox or CNN, and you see so many of the things that are happening, sometimes you think twice before coming this way. I lived in Montreal. I lived in Geneva. I lived in London for many years. I lived in Cairo. Without a shadow of a doubt the only city where I can go down the street and walk at 3:00 in the morning without looking behind my back is Cairo. Can you imagine going out on a Saturday night or a Friday night and going to pick your car from a parking lot, a multi-store parking lot at 2:00 in the morning without really being cautious? Here, you don’t even think of these things. But the perception is different. What we did so far, I think we were successful, but not enough. We had a few partnerships, for example, with Columbia, Princeton, HBS, University of South Carolina, University of Toronto, for example, in North America. And we hosted the MBA, the EMBA, and the undergraduate classes for two-, three-week periods. When they come they have a mix of lectures at the university, field visits, field to factory, trips to the stock exchange, and a bit of a social and cultural program. I thought that these are going to be the ambassadors, when they go back they’re going to share what they’ve seen. And so far, we’ve done maybe, I don’t know, 45, maybe 50 trips over the last 10 years, and none of them had negative implications. Yet, the 50 trips, even if you multiply by 50 students each, that’s still tiny. You need those people to be more vocal about what they experienced. Yes. And I have to say, some of them are, thanks to social media. So they go back and you start seeing their posts on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, whatever, X now, and so on. So I think social media helped and encouraged others to send their kids as well. So the flow is growing — not as fast as I want it, not as big as I want it. But it’s growing every year. Another thing I think you’ve probably used social media to combat, perhaps, is the perception that Cairo might not be a safe place for women to study. How many women do you have in your programs? Off the top of my head, talking students, I would say probably 70% are women, 72%. Women is not an issue in Egypt. If I talk staff, and what I mean by staff, professional staff, not faculty. If you were surprised with the 72% women students, the professional staff are probably 92%. The faculty are probably 60% women. Let me explain to you what happens here. The media always takes the angle of, “If you’re a tourist or if you’re a woman, be careful.” I promise you, I’m turning 60. This is nonsense. What happens is, if someone is going to get mugged, it doesn’t matter if you are a local or a tourist, because they don’t know. And I promise you, it doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. Do you see the Middle East region as poised to be a bastion of graduate business education? Do you see that for your school and other schools in the region? The short answer is yes. But let me explain, why do I say yes? You look at the higher education landscape, specifically business education in the region. 100 years ago there were two institutions. Just two. Today, I think it’s north of 1,000. Not all of them are at the same quality, that’s for sure. But then if you look at the demographics of this region and that north of 60%, actually more, maybe 65% are under the age of 21. And the vast majority are not going anymore to law or engineering or medicine, but it’s all the intersection of business and technology, business and innovation. Everybody wants to have a start-up. Not everybody is going to end up with a start-up or a successful start-up, but they feel that business and management education is the way to make a difference in society. So the incredible growth and the demand pushed more and more, not necessarily public universities, but private as well, either standalone or in collaboration with institutions from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the like, are not just opening up branches and facilities and so on, but they also realized that with the exposure that the students have, they don’t settle with any mediocre quality. So gradually they’re upping their game, because they know if you don’t offer me what I want, I’m going to go somewhere else. So I think the future of business and management education, and you look at even the statistics of the business schools that are even within the AACSB network that are getting accredited, they are the fastest region everywhere. Okay, granted because they’re coming from behind, but because of the size of the population and the growth of the population, I think much, much better days are on the way. The potential is crazy. DON’T MISS HUGE GIFT GIVES TOP MIDEAST B-SCHOOL A NEW NAME