Walk like an Egyptian

By Edmund Bower

Ahmed Elmalky, a 25-year-old from Mahallah, comes from a solid middle-class family. The son of a civil servant and a primary school teacher, he has a degree in business administration from Mansoura University. But after graduating in 2013, he struggled to find work. He eventually took a job at a Cairo call center, cold-calling Australians and Canadians with cell-phone offers for a monthly salary of LE 1,200. Around nine months ago, he landed a better job as a stock broker, managing portfolios for wealthy Saudi clients. Still, he earns a monthly maximum salary of LE 3,000 if he meets his targets—which, he says, “never” happens.

Still single, and sharing an unfurnished flat in Faysal with four other people—he sleeps on a mattress on the floor—Elmalky is desperate to leave Egypt. But with a run-of-the-mill degree from an average university, without technology training or other internationally marketable skills, he has few career options, at home or abroad. He’s resorted to applying for scholarships at graduate programs in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in Turkey, Russia, Poland and the Netherlands. It’s not that Elmalky hates his country. “If I could find a good job here, I would never leave,” he says. But Cairo is teeming with unemployed university graduates just like him.

A stagnant economy and a burgeoning population has plagued Egypt with one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world, with joblessness at 42 percent among young people aged 15 to 24, according to the International Labour Organization, compared to an overall unemployment rate of around 13 percent. Paradoxically, joblessness is highest among young college graduates. Meanwhile, the jobs that are available tend to offer low pay and few opportunities for advancement. Little wonder that a 2014 survey by The American University in Cairo found that 90 percent of undergraduates at Egypt’s premier institution of higher learning said they wanted to move abroad.

Egypt and the entire Middle East have suffered for years from the twin problems of high unemployment and brain drain, but in the last six years, things have become markedly worse. As the economy tanked following the 2011 revolution and opportunities became even scarcer, a feeling of political disaffection spread among Egyptian youth. Steadily climbing prices have reached record levels since November, when the Central Bank floated the pound—while salaries have mostly stayed unchanged. The rising cost of living has made it even harder for Egypt to hold on to its best and brightest, who can earn exponentially higher salaries abroad in hard currencies that stretch farther than ever back home. In the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Competitiveness Index, Egypt was ranked 104th out of 138 countries in its ability to retain talent.

Nada Magdy is a 21-year-old medical student from Mansoura, in the Egyptian Delta. The daughter of two teachers, she has never been outside of the country, but even so, just four years into a seven-year course, she has her heart set on leaving. “I’m thinking to go abroad,” she says, “and never come back.” Like many other Egyptians with stellar academic records—including her brother and sister before her—Magdy chose to study medicine and pursue a career in public health. But the reality awaiting her as she nears graduation is a residency in an Egyptian state hospital earning around LE 1,800 a month; as an intern, she’ll fetch just LE 250. She remembers six years ago feeling a sense of hope when, at 15, she watched the crowds protesting in Tahrir Square on her living room TV. But those days are long gone. Magdy’s worked hard and done everything expected of her, but she doesn’t see a future for herself in Egypt. “There’s no respect here,” she says. 

She’s not alone. Young Egyptians who witnessed the revolution “felt like they were promised something,” a new age of liberty and prosperity that never came to pass, according to Amro Ali, an assistant professor of sociology at AUC. “Now they’ve come of age, and they feel let down.” Compounding things, the economic malaise that followed the political upheavals has only made life harder for young graduates. “Despair takes over,” says Ali. “People can deal with hardship, but they really can’t deal with despair.”

For decades, labor has been one of Egypt’s major exports. In 2015, Egyptian workers overseas wired some $20 billion home, more than quadruple the revenue of the Suez Canal. That year, so-called remittances were the country’s number two source of hard currency, second only to exports, according to the Central Bank. Research by the Migration Policy Centre  indicates that, as of 2013, more than 4 million Egyptians were working abroad, the vast majority of whom were doing menial jobs in the Gulf or Libya, the favorite destinations for local immigrants seeking temporary work outside the country, since the oil boom in the 1970s.

Highly skilled professionals like doctors and engineers, however—who tend to come from families who are already relatively well off—are more likely to move abroad permanently. Such emigrants often send little or no money home. Meanwhile, the constant trickle of top talent amounts to “a loss to the country,” according to Ibrahim Awad, the director of AUC’s Center for Migration and Refugee Studies. Doctors, in particular—who can earn exponentially more abroad than the paltry salaries they’re paid at home—have left the country in droves, while Egypt’s public health system, which serves the vast majority of the population, is in shambles. Research from 2010 found that more than a third of Egyptian psychiatrists were working abroad. In December, a parliamentary health committee, decrying the “shortage of doctors” caused by emigration, proposed a law that would force physicians to work at local public hospitals for at least 10 years following graduation. The doctors’ syndicate strongly opposed the idea. 

In the meantime, medical students like Magdy are sizing up their options early, joining new organizations like the Egyptian Association for American Medical Training and Research, a group founded in 2012 by an Egyptian expatriate physician in the United States who sought to advise medical students here on opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic. Volunteers with the group report a surge in students inquiring into careers overseas in recent months. “Everything is getting expensive,” says Magdy, who dreams of relocating to the United States, where doctors are highly paid and enjoy a living standard to match.

But it’s not just money motivating the exodus of Egypt’s top talent. Kareem Sameh Seoudy, 26, left the country only a year after graduating from medical school at Ain Shams University. Now he lives and works in Texas, where he researches bipolar disorder in infants at the Baylor College of Medicine. He makes $45,000 a year, a relatively modest salary in America, especially for a physician. But recently married, he and his new bride live comfortably with their two cats in a 700-square-meter apartment in San Antonio. Seoudy’s good fortune did not come without sweat and perseverance. In order to fulfill his longtime dream of moving to the United States, Seoudy managed to take and pass the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination alongside his medical degree. “I emailed more than 500 professors in so many states and hospitals,” he says, “until one of them replied to me and decided to take a chance and hire me.”

Even still, he admits that he misses his country. “If I had the chance to do what I'm doing here, in Egypt, and get a salary that's half or even a quarter what I get here, I would go back without even thinking about it,” he says via Skype from Texas. “I miss my family. I miss how busy Cairo is, how you can go out at any time and find people out on the street.” But Egypt simply doesn’t offer the kinds of opportunities ambitious young people like Seoudy seek, even in elite professions like medicine. “Research is not that important in Egypt,” he says. He wants to make a contribution to the field, do more than simply “treat chronic diseases.”  

Seoudy says he’s still entertaining the idea of moving back home to Egypt in five or 10 years, but the odds are that he won’t. Unlike temporary workers in the Gulf, Egyptians who emigrate to the West rarely return, explains Awad of the AUC migration-studies center. Instead, they tend to marry and eventually have children in America or Europe and build new lives there. Seoudy doesn’t like the idea of ending up like other Egyptian doctors in the United States whose children have all but discarded their parents’ culture. “Their kids don't even know the language,” he says. “It would be shocking to me if my own kids didn't speak Arabic.”

Digital nomads

With the huge demand for skilled IT workers created by the growing technology industry in advanced economies, coders and programmers and other technical types are particularly sought after. Trained techies are so in-demand that they can often land well-paid jobs abroad without having to pass language exams, and they sometimes benefit from expedited visas. “People with great skills, especially technical skills, are able to find better opportunities in the Gulf and in the European market,” according to Somaya El Sherbini, a recruitment consultant who used to headhunt for Microsoft Egypt.

Whiz kids like software engineer Mostafa Ali, 25, who graduated from the German University in Cairo with a degree in computer science, have their pick of plum international jobs. “I applied at Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, he says, “and I had offers from all of them.” He’s now helping develop software in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for driverless cars being developed by mobile taxi app Uber, the world’s most valuable startup. Ali didn’t want to disclose his salary; although starting salaries at top tech companies are typically six figures.

Not bad for a guy who a year ago was earning LE 2,500 a month at a local startup, which at the current exchange rate, amounts to less than $140 a month. He quit after just six months, concluding that the enterprise, like many local startups, was run by “below-average kind of people” without much industry experience or vision for the future. “If you want to be successful, you need to work with talented people,” says Ali. “You don't build good software on your own.” It’s an industry that needs innovators. “Egypt has a lot of talented people,” he says, “the problem is, they all work here.”

Meanwhile, Egypt’s own fledgling tech sector is left with a very small pool of talent in which to fish. Mohamed Khalil is a 36-year-old Alexandria native and a former Fulbright scholar who works as a senior web designer at a Cairo software company. In the eight years he’s been with the firm, finding qualified workers has become increasingly difficult, he says. These days in particular, “It takes the company a long time to find a good candidate.” Much of the talent the firm does manage to hire ends up departing for greener pastures as soon as they get a little experience under their belts. “They stay for one or two years,” and leave for higher paying positions abroad, says Khalil. In the last two years, eight members of his team have left for jobs in places like Dubai, Berlin, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur.

This leaves firms like his with a dearth of experienced staff to train fresh graduates. This inevitably takes a toll. “You can really feel the impact,” he says. “The best products are developed by seniors. The new guys are not mature enough. You can see the defects.” This scarcity of experienced professionals means local companies have become stagnant and failed to keep pace with industry innovations, which is crucial in the tech sector.

Even Khalil, after nearly a decade with the same software firm, is getting bored. “I’ve hit some kind of ceiling in terms of progression,” he says. “There is no room to grow.” It didn’t help that his salary is worth about half of what it was a year ago, in dollar terms. For all these reasons, he recently accepted a position as a designer for a prominent Swedish software company in Stockholm. He’s scheduled to move in August and doesn’t plan to return: “There's no point in coming back to Egypt.”

Nice work, if you can get it

On the other hand, the country is teeming with non-technical professionals who are desperate for good jobs. Ahmed Shedid, who grew up in the Delta farming town of Khanka, the son of two civil servants, attended local schools and eventually earned a law degree from Ain Shams University. But in Egypt, in order to land a decent job as an attorney, “You need connections,” he says.

After moving to Cairo and protesting in Tahrir Square in 2011, Shedid jumped between a series of low-paying jobs. He was a salesman at a discount mall, a painter’s assistant and finally a chef at a restaurant, where he worked more than 100 hours a week for LE 500 a month plus meals.

Like countless others, he applied for work abroad only to find out that there was little demand for Egyptian lawyers. Desperate, he finally paid a family acquaintance $3,000 for a one-year visa to pick fruit in Cyprus, only for the man to disappear with his money. “Egypt is like a big jail,” says the discouraged Shedid.

He even tried to apply for residency in Liberland, a “micronation” a Czech activist tried to create in 2015 on an unclaimed three-square-mile enclave in the Balkans. Though the self-proclaimed new country consists of nothing more than a dirt road and a wooden shack, its founders reportedly received some 50,000 citizenship applications—nearly half of which came from Egypt.

Now 34, Shedid is doing further studies in Slovenia. The irony of his struggle—one that’s familiar to countless Egyptians—is that, in a sea of young people desperate for jobs, employers struggle to find qualified candidates. Maha Guindi, executive director of the AUC Career Center, says that employers are constantly telling her, “‘We have this job, do you know someone?’” The problem is regional. The British Council estimated in a 2015 report that this skills mismatch costs the Arab World as much as $50 billion a year.

At the heart of the issue is an outdated and inadequate educational system. Ahmed El-Ashmawy, a human resources specialist who works at the regional offices of UK-based development group Adam Smith International, says fields ranging from teaching to construction are in dire need of skilled workers, while the Egyptian schools continue to churn out technical professionals, commerce graduates and lawyers. There still persists a cultural expectation that high-achieving students must become engineers or doctors, while crucial fields like education and nursing get middling talent. As El-Ashmawy puts it: “How many lawyers do we need?”

Increasingly, the only jobs available for the estimated 100,000 Egyptians who graduate each year with foreign language skills are in customer service. According to the IT Industry Development Agency, the number of people working in call centers has doubled over the last four years to some 50,000. While the government has touted the so-called outsourcing industry as a key component of the country’s economic growth strategy, critics argue that these monotonous jobs pay too little and offer limited potential for progression.

Yet, for a privileged few, life in Egypt is pretty cushy. At 27, Sherif Aziz is a regional business development manager at Microsoft Egypt. A native of Mohandeseen, he attended a French international school and got a Master’s degree in information systems from France’s Nantes University in 2012. He’s fluent in three languages, goes to nightclubs on weekends and, until recently, lived alone in a three-bedroom flat in the upmarket suburb of New Maadi with his two golden retrievers.

“I always wanted to leave the country,” says Aziz. “Both my parents were doctors, and I always saw how little money they made compared to what doctors earn abroad.” Aziz adds that during the few years he lived in France for graduate school, he felt more at home in a cosmopolitan European city than he did in Cairo. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that he’s “making really good money” here, probably around the same amount he’d earn if he took a job in France. But in a city like Paris, he knows he’d be forking over a good portion of his monthly earnings to a landlord in order to live in a tiny apartment or a share with roommates. Here, on the same salary, he could afford a spacious flat with high-ceilings and antique details in a central neighborhood like Zamalek or a villa with a lawn and a swimming pool in a gated satellite-city comjop. 

In Cairo, Aziz never has to worry about money. “If I want to buy something, I just go downstairs and buy it,” he says. He has plenty of friends who are similarly comfortable, people from good families with lucrative jobs. “They have so much fun here,” says Aziz. “I know people who lived in the States,” says Aziz, “And now they are back and happier than ever. You have your family here. You have a big house in 6 October, you go out and have fun in Zamalek. You live in your own bubble.”

© Business Monthly 2017