Pathways to Higher Education
Pathways to Higher Education (PHE/EG) is a soft-skills oriented training program funded by Ford Foundation in fourteen different countries across the globe, and implemented in Egypt by Cairo University represented by CAPSCU in three phases over a period of ten years, starting 2002 through 2012. The main objectives of PHE/EG is to enhance the skills of socially disadvantaged (underprivileged) groups among the university students and graduates, focusing on students and graduates of humanities and social sciences specializations preserving gender equal opportunity, with a primary view to improving their chances of access to postgraduate studies, enhancing their prospects to benefit from any scholarships programs, and/or maximizing their potential for acquiring better employment opportunities. These developmental issues are in-line with the overall objectives and reform strategy of the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) that is being implemented in phases by the Projects Management Unit (PMU/MOHE). To achieve an effective outreach, CAPSCU established partnerships with counterpart stakeholders concerned with skills-oriented human resources capacity building. One of the partners is the Social Fund for Development (SFD)] a government funding mechanism that provides support for graduates to start their own businesses. In addition, the main beneficiaries are the ten Egyptian public universities participating in Phase-I & Phase-II of the PHE/EG project, namely Cairo, Ain-Shams, Assiut, Helwan, Minia, South Valley, Fayoum, Beni-Suef, Benha and Suhag, as well as the remaining eight of the existing eighteen public universities that will participate in Phase-III, namely, Alexandria, Mansoura, Zagazig, Menoufia, Tanta, Suez Canal, Kafr El-Sheikh, Port Said and Damanhoor. The Management Team of PHE/EG project established a management network infrastructure/mechanism that allows for the concurrent implementation of the PHE/EG training programs in all public universities, biannually during mid-term and summer holidays. This entails having a project coordinator in each university working closely with the PHE/EG management team to cater for all logistical matters for running the training programs , including; interviews of applicants that meet the preliminary online screening criteria, providing them with automated online assessment tests and selecting the successful applicants for the training programs. In addition, project coordinators, being senior faculty members in their respective universities, were able to provide job opportunities to some of the distinguished trainees.