In looking for a solution, Egypt has returned to a revolutionary mode

By: Michael Armanious

Two years after Mubarak’s fall from power, Egyptians are still demonstrating on the streets of many cities across the country as they search for solutions to mounting challenges in food, healthcare, energy, transportation, land and much more.

Currently, less than 6% of Egypt’s landmass, 1,000,000 Km², is inhabited by its 92 million people. By the year 2050, the Egyptian population will increase by 60 million people. The core problem for Egypt is the redistribution of the population over new areas, which requires new lands, new energy sources, new water resources, and the creation of new cities with industrial sections, homes, schools, and transportation systems.

In effort to help Egypt’s social and economic challenges, a few local Egyptian-American professionals from MIT and Harvard started Egypt NEGMA, a non-profit organization, to search for new ideas and to promote innovative and entrepreneurial projects that respond to the broad social and economic needs in Egypt. The NEGMA conference will be held on March 23 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) media lab.

This year’s keynote speaker at the NEGMA conference is Dr. Farouk El-Baz. Dr. El-Baz, an Egyptian-American, worked for NASA during the Apollo program and assisted in the planning of scientific exploration of the Moon, including the selection of landing sites for the Apollo missions and the training of astronauts in lunar observations. As the director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, Dr. E-Baz also developed a “Development Corridor” project that would give Egypt large, new, urban, industrial and agricultural areas ($24 billion Estimated cost in 2010) as a response to Egypt’s historical land problem.

As part of the project headed by Dr. El-Baz, there would be a superhighway and a railway network running from the northern coast to the southern border of the country that is connected to the Nile River. This project would have both short and long term solutions to the high rate of population growth and expand the limited inhabited area (6%) outside of the Nile valley into adjacent, and then further successive areas. 

Over 43 years ago, Dr. El-Baz was trusted with assisting the spacemen in landing safely on the moon during the Apollo missions; however, Dr. El-Baz’s “Development Corridor” project is still trying to clear the ancient Egyptian bureaucratic processes.

There are thousands of villages in the desert vicinity known for very low income, high illiteracy rate, and the absence of any economic opportunities, the inhabitants of which are the main source of migration to the slums area in Cairo and other major Egyptian cities. These villages would benefit from El-Baz’s “Development Corridor” project by being given another option: moving west to the new communities that this project would create.

This integrated project, coupled with an incentive campaign that includes low-cost homes, new social service benefits—and most importantly employment focused vocational and technical training, would attract people to these new communities. 

For the past two years the NEGMA conference has been held on the campus of MIT, the source of much innovation in the digital age and recently responsible for the massive open online course (MOOC). With over 65 million cell phone and web users in Egypt, MOOC can be configured in Arabic to deliver online courses that are relevant to the local and the international market needs. Egyptians can also integrate Khan Academy free courses with MOOC to optimize their outdated education system.

These technological innovations in education can help Egypt to move away from its physical borders and integrate with the rest of the world much more quickly, and can help the world also to learn from and about the rich culture of Egypt.

There is daily unrest, looting, and riots on the streets of many cities in Egypt because the youth have lost faith in the old guards. Two years ago, they used Google, Facebook, and twitter to overthrow the old regime in just 18 days. Their movement was peaceful because they know how to use technology to mobilize millions of people to disarm the totalitarian government.

Technology is the undisputed solution that Egypt needs in order to get out of the current stalemate. If this continues unchecked, it will lead to a civil war and an uncertain future not just for Egypt, but for the region, and perhaps for the rest of the world.