MTC Vice Chair Jane Marquardt provided the following update on MTC’s project in Egypt:

MTC is excited to announce that our Economic & Social Development division’s project in Egypt has been extended for another year. We’ve been working in Egypt under a [United States Agency for International Development] USAID project since the fall of 2015. It’s called WISE, or Workforce Improvement and Skill Enhancement. So, we currently have about 70 employees located in Egypt, our main office is in Cairo, and we are working in 11 different places throughout the country.

Two of the main goals of our project are to upgrade their technical school education. That’s one of them. And, another one is to really enhance the connections between schools and private employers, similar to what we do in our Job Corps programs where we build strong community councils. So in Egypt, as part of doing that, we’ve really been out doing a lot of training and we have gotten to interact with a lot of people around the country.

You really get good insight into the work that MTC is doing in Egypt by looking at the number of people we’ve trained. So, thus far in the project we’ve been able to train 700 teachers to be better at helping their students with workforce readiness skills. We have helped over 14,000 students who’ve graduated from the technical schools find gainful employment, and we’ve helped set up internships for over 11,500 students. So, they’ve gone out and been able to work in a company that relates to what they want to do as a career. All of those numbers together make us very proud at MTC to say this is one more way that we are helping create a better world. We are giving people skills so they can become employable, so they can hold jobs, so their communities will be more stable. It’s exactly what we love doing at MTC, and we’re excited to be continuing to work in Egypt.