Social Entrepreneurship

Highlighted Work 1

Change Manager: Ashoka Fellowship Regional Representative - Ashoka Arab World

2013 - 2015

Ashoka is the world's largest social entrepreneurship platform for system changing, high impact social entrepreneurs. As a regional Arab World representative of Ashoka's flagship program: the Ashoka Fellowship, I worked with the Arab region's leading social innovators on system thinking and scaling up strategies, while leading a team of 6 people between staff and interns.


My work allowed me to do the following:


Search, Selection and Support of Ashoka Fellows (Social Entrepreneurs)

  • Created, and engaged a network of 100+ nominators for social entrepreneurs across Arab countries. Nominators are experts from the business, media, academia and social sectors.

  • Conducted 4 selection panels electing 20 high impact social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows. This involved field visits, discussions with panels of local experts, and background research into these social entrepreneurs' fields to assess their innovations and how they fill the gaps in their fields in context-specific ways.

  • Coached more than 100 leading social entrepreneurs across the Arab region, creating tailored support services, capacity building programs, one-on-one coaching and relevant partnerships.


Prototype Children and Youth Social Entrepreneurship and Changemaking Programs

  • Co-developed and prototyped a social entrepreneurship training curriculum with incubation components for youth social entrepreneurs.

  • Designed and launched a prototype of a new initiative (Khaleek Makano - Put yourself in their shoes) to teach public school children changemaking and empathy skills in collaboration with the Ministry of Education in Egypt and Ashoka’s network of education-focused social entrepreneurs; facilitated curriculum co-creation and managed social media messaging.

Co-create Connecting Platforms: ChangemakersXchange & Changemakers Summit

  • Co-facilitated and co-designed early versions of the now global network of ChangemakersXchange, a global Ashoka network of support and a vibrant collectively-organized platform for youth changemakers around the world. I did this work in collaboration with Ashoka Germany.

  • Co-facilitated and supported the organizing of Ashoka East Africa Changemakers Summit, linking youth, high impact leading social entrepreneurs and policy makers in East Africa to showcase system changing innovative possibilities and foster dialogue across stakeholders.

Foster Community and Policy Dialogue around Social Innovation and Hybrid Social-Business Models

  • Co-organized roundtable discussions between policy makers, social innovators and business leaders to foster dialogue around hybrid social business models to advance an agenda of innovative collaborations, wrote and published white papers on such roundtables.

  • Spoke and held workshops around social innovation at relevant platforms to different audiences spreading awareness and fostering dialogue. This included being at universities, social incubators and co-working spaces events and relevant entrepreneurship conferences like RISE up, the Arab region's biggest entrepreneurship summit.

Highlighted Work 2

Founder and Director: Mesahat: Liberating Learning Spaces

2017 - 2020

Founded a community, grassroots social enterprise and designed its model. Mesahat offered a model of democratic, self-directed, agile and critical social-justice oriented education for children, youth and families.


This work involved me doing and the enterprise accomplishing the following :

Designed a facilitators training program that can be conducted between 3-days to a 6-months diploma. Fruition: Trained 150+ facilitators, created an Alumni network of self-directed and agile education facilitators in Egypt.


Designed an opensource toolkit and a mentorship program for the model to be implemented by any community group. Fruition: 4 other community groups started similar community learning spaces in their own neighborhoods.


Created a year-long learning program. Worked with over 200 families and children to experience this education model through a community learning center with collective governance and community organizing.


Organized more than 20 community dialogues, events, seminar series, awareness workshops touring Egypt, hosting: global speakers, inspirational models from around the world, inspirational local educational models from projects and families in Egypt and academic researchers on popular, self-directed and community-based education.



Led and managed between 6-12 employees and volunteers over 4 years, implementing agile and teal methods of decentralized, collective organizational governance mechanisms.



Invited for speaking engagements around the world on topics of: creating community and self-organized learning environments, social-justice/critical/decolonial and popular education, social innovation, social transformation & youth leadership. Notable speeches: Keynote for the European Democratic Education Conference’18 & TEDxMinia’16.



Fundraised, pitched in competitions, created conceptual and logframes and reports.


Participated in study trips to grassroots and government institutions on: popular education, civic & life-long learning, democratic education and others in several countries including: USA, Mexico, Denmark, Germany, India and Jordan.




Participated in several fellowships and incubations including: IDEX Social Innovation Fellowship (India), Shikshantar Hacking Education Fellowship (India), Nahdet El-Mahrousa social innovation incubator (Egypt).