By Mohammed Allouba News Focus Achilles Heel The crisis in Greece, and the collapse of the euro, could scuttle Egypt’s plans for economic growth. River of Strife A new agreement among East African countries may spell the end of Egyptian control over the Nile . On the Block Foreign investors buy up African farmland, sparking fears of a new colonialism.

By Jessica Gray

Most university graduates are concerned with one thing after school ends: finding a job, any job. But not 24-year-old American University in Cairo graduate Seif Abou Zaid. Instead of finding a firm where he could begin his climb in the corporate world, he and partner Eman Elba decided to start their own company dedicated to giving their peers a better understanding of business. What started as an idea in 2007 soon became a full-fledged company called the Agency for Development and Advancement (ADAA).

Last year, Abou Zaid, ADAA’s managing director, and his staff of eight, all of whom are 25 or younger, trained more than 4,000 high school and university students as well as young professionals in the business arts of conflict resolution, communications, presentation to upper managers, effective management, business etiquette and client relationship management. The company also has programs geared toward entrepreneurship, social responsibility and a guide for surviving freshman year for high school students.

This year, despite tough economic times forcing companies to spend less on training, ADAA’s goals are to offer more courses and expand its core business. Abou Zaid says his clients were initially wary of the staff’s youth, since most trainers are in the industry a long time before starting their own company. In the end however, they were willing to take a chance on ADAA, recognizing the company’s sound plan for future growth, the staff’s experience in training and its extensive network of youth leaders and organizations.

“The training company we’re operating now is only one arm of the services offered for youths. Our plan by the end of 2013, is to have a variety of services, not only in training. Maybe it will involve community development, job creation, publications, and so forth, so that we can serve our clients better,” says Abou Zaid. So far, the company has done well for itself, gaining the notice of Vodafone and Nile Engineering. The companies used ADAA to train over 100 of their employees last year prior to the launch of their Nile Tel centers, a national joint project to set up specialized kiosks that handle everything from internet service to phone lines and call center activities. ADAA also ran a training session for consumer protection agencies in April 2008, funded by USAID.

Abou Zaid and Elba, the company’s executive director, say their plan is to train more than 25,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25 and ensure that the company’s annual profit hits the LE 1 million mark in the next four years. An ambitious goal, admits Abou Zaid, but one to which he and his staff are committed. They’re helped by the fact that the majority of the clientele are students who are less affected by the current financial slowdown than many others in the business community. In order to realize his vision, ADAA is marketing annual memberships to its clients and making its Success Keys for Young (SKY) Managers workshops more accessible by offering more frequent training days.

ADAA is building on the success of February’s SKY Managers conference. More than 100 young managers attended the two-day event at the Cairo International Conference Center in Nasr City. Headlining the conference as keynote speaker was Curtis Bateman, chief executive officer of international training firm Red Tree Leadership and Development, formally known as Spencer Johnson Partners. The company is behind the best-selling business books written by Spencer Johnson, MD, such as The One Minute Manager, co-authored by Kenneth Blanchard, and Who Moved My Cheese?, about management success strategies and adapting to change, respectively.

Abou Zaid says he considers his markets an untapped niche desperately needing this kind of training. ADAA gets numerous requests from students and young people who don’t know the first thing about writing a resume, let alone what it takes to gain an entry-level position at the company they want.

In an editorial written for Al-Ahram Weekly this past January, Magda Shahin, director of the American Chamber of Commerce’s Trade Related Assistance Center, addressed the necessity of having an edge in the current job market.

“Some 80% of the unemployed are first time job seekers who are increasingly university graduates or those of specialized vocational schools,” she wrote. “This persistent growth of the workforce will likely be aggravated by the present economic crisis, when global layoffs usher in waves of returnees in addition to the increased number of layoffs domestically.” The problem is exacerbated by employers’ struggle to find skilled laborers with reasonable work ethics and respect for the job, she added.

The national unemployment rate for last year is estimated to be about 8%. That’s less than half of the rate of youth unemployment, cited as 16.9% in 2006 in a report called “The Middle East in a Post Oil-Boom Era?” by Navtej Dhillon. Dhillon directs the Middle East Youth Initiative of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, a non-profit, public policy research institution.

Maged Hosny, founder of the non-profit International Consultancy for Development Support in Egypt, says most young people are unaware of their career and training options and end up unemployed or working in an occupation they don’t enjoy. Recent graduates and high school students don’t know what they want to do after they finish their studies, he says, and thus take classes in subjects they’ll never use after entering the workforce. For young people between 15 and 29 years old, this can lead to long-term unemployment or to switching between jobs over a short period of time.

To help students and youth learn about their career options, Hosny founded the International Consultancy for Development Support last year, an NGO that offers students focused career counseling. Based on his extensive experience in job counseling, resume writing and market research, Hosny says that aptitude testing, one-on-one career counseling, job ethics workshops and field trips make a big difference for students looking to find ‘the right job’ or training opportunity. So far, in conjunction with a few vocational schools, Hosny has been piloting a career-counseling program that aims to provide students with more up-to-date insight on industries and job markets. He hopes that by expanding these programs, educators will be able to better match their curricula to the needs of both job seekers and employers.

Abou Zaid says students and young people are not a priority for other training companies because they are not as profitable as corporate clients, but that hasn’t stopped ADAA. They believe that the advantage to tapping into this market lies in the fact that these youth will eventually climb their own corporate ladders and appreciate the benefits that ADAA’s specialized training provides.

“I don’t blame other companies for focusing on other corporations because this is where the big money comes from. You can focus on two or three clients and that makes your company succeed [ but] we believe a lot in the power of this market because, when you serve youth now and you build loyalty with them, in 10 years they will become corporate leaders,” he says.

Abou Zaid says ADAA courses are unique because they center on experiential learning. For example, the courses currently offered to students from international high schools throughout Greater Cairo, including at The American International and Modern English Schools in New Cairo, all involve simulations where the students are forced to tackle real-world problems with real-world solutions. Students must also create their own financial records and cash flow statements to prove they understand what it takes to run a company. Every course and workshop has been built from the ground up, based on in-depth interviews with Egyptian business professionals.

“It is one of our other core competencies. We have a research team, which we use to develop our courses ourselves [] We’re not reading books, going on the Internet or looking at other training programs. We’re actually interviewing more than 30 young professionals from all around Egypt in several professions, in order to develop an entrepreneurship course [that will teach] lessons learned about things that work and don’t work in Egypt,” says Abou Zaid. ADAA works with eight private high schools, but plans to expand the program to public schools in the next few years with the help of financial sponsors.

On top of launching new courses and adding a membership program and more programming for SKY Managers, Abou Zaid says the company is focusing on shedding overhead costs and stabilizing ADAA’s cash flow in order to reach his financial objective by the end of 2013.

“We call ourselves social entrepreneurs because, yes, it’s a company and it’s for profit, but at the same time it aims to have a social impact in terms of creating Egyptian leaders in several fields. Our vision is to take them and our country forward. We have a bottom line, we want to achieve high revenues and profit but we have a very direct and clear social impact in our minds. These are our goals,” says Abou Zaid. bt