IbtikarKhana

Iman Bibars, PhD

Vice President, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public Regional Director, Ashoka Arab World
Co-founder, Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW)
Founder and Managing Director, IbtikarKhana.

A visionary for social entrepreneurship and a pioneer of women-led and gender-focused development initiatives for over 30 years, Iman Bibars is the Vice President of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public and the Regional Director of Ashoka Arab World. In keeping with Ashoka’s broad mandate to accelerate social change by identifying and investing in leading social entrepreneurs, Dr. Bibars has brought her own extensive experience as a social entrepreneur committed to solving issues of gender inequality to inform and guide her work supporting hundreds of leading and rising social innovators throughout the Arab World and beyond.
Having launched Ashoka Arab World in 2003, Dr. Bibars continues to lead its efforts today from its regional hub in Cairo. Under her direction, the organization has expanded its operations to 12 countries in the Arab region, identifying and building the capacities of more than 100 Arab social entrepreneurs elected as Ashoka Fellows and raising more than 12 million dollars to sustain Ashoka’s global activities.
A lifelong and staunch advocate of the rights of women, Dr. Bibars has pioneered Ashoka’s efforts to empower women in social innovation. As part of this work, she established Women’s Initiative for Social Entrepreneurship (WISE) in 2018 aiming to comprehensively redefine the terms that preclude women social entrepreneurs from creating and growing diverse system-changing solutions. Iman is leading a team of teams across the Global North and Global south with the aim of increasing the number of elected female social entrepreneurs and establishing accelerators to help them grow their work.
Dr. Bibars is also the co-founder and current chairperson of Egypt’s very first microfinance organization, the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW): a citizen sector organization that provides credit and legal aid for impoverished female heads of household. ADEW became the first association in Egypt and the Arab world to provide microloans without guarantors and/or guarantees. Among the many testaments to ADEW’s work, the microloan program now operates in 4 governorates around Egypt and has reached more than 509,000 women to date. Under Dr. Bibars’ direct management, ADEW spearheaded the change of the Egyptian Nationality law, putting female heads of household on the government’s political agenda for the first time.
In 2016, Dr. Bibars founded IbtikarKhana, the first local social entrepreneurship school in Egypt and the Arab World, with an aim of creating an inclusive community of proactive and innovative critical-thinkers, problem-solvers and entrepreneurs, and provide them with the skills and knowledge needed to launch successful social ventures that create meaningful change and address the country’s most pressing challenges. To date, IbtikarKhana has worked with 662 social entrepreneurs from 6 Arab countries who managed to impact 24,446 beneficiaries.
With an international career spanning from UNICEF to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and the World Bank, Bibars is a globally revered social development expert. Bibars has offered her expertise in women’s development issues to the World Bank, UNDP, European Commission and the International Development and Research Center. Bibars was a Peace Fellow at Georgetown & Parvin Fellow at Princeton University. She received a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Political Science from The American University in Cairo; Bibars completed her PhD in Development Studies and Anthropology from Sussex University. Bibars is the author of several books on gender issues including Victims and Heroines: Women, Welfare and the Egyptian State, and The Women of Tahrir, which details the most recent experiences of women during the Egyptian uprising. Bibars also published one of the first books written in Arabic on US President Barack Obama– Dreams of a Good Fellow. Recently her fourth book was published; The maids and I.

Nehal Attiya Morgan Training Coordinator of Ibtikar Khana
Nehal holds a BA in Political Science and Statistics from Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. She has a diploma in Non-Formal Education from Alwan Wa Awtar Organization “School for Practitioners of Non-Formal Education”. Nehal is a Lazord Fellowship Alumina for Leadership and Civic Engagement from John D. Gerhart Center AUC.
During Nehal’s work at IbtikarKhana as the Training Coordinator, Nehal manages the entrepreneurial journey of young social entrepreneurs as she works closely with them to enable them to establish or expand their social ventures. In addition, she supervises the execution of all tasks and follow-up all activities related to the trainings to be delivered according to the project criteria, timeline, and budget. Moreover, Nehal works on developing the reports required from the Managing Director of IbtikarKhana and the different donors. In addition, she leads the publicity and outreach efforts of IbtikarKhana– both on the level of individual entrepreneurs and innovators, and on the level of larger organizations and partners.
Nehal is a passionate development practitioner since 2017, she has volunteered and worked in different projects with different organizations in Egypt such as; Sting for Consultancy and Design, Science Crafts, Safarni, and Alwan Wa Awtar, and Tulime Onlus Association in Sicilia, Italia.
Besides, she worked as "Transition to Employment Unit Coordinator" in USAID “Workforce Egypt”, where she led the operational and administrative needs of the unit, including developing the report and presentation documents, arranging meetings internally and externally with MoETE, conducting the field visits for monitoring and evaluation in Egypt’s various governorates, and helping in reviewing and updating the Entrepreneurship and Career Guidance curriculum in the vocational and technical schools in Egypt.
Nehal’s different areas of expertise in general include: Child/Youth Development, Project Coordination, Curriculum Development, Facilitating, Research, and Non-Formal Education.

Mariam El-Zomor Case Manager
Mariam El-Zomor, a holder of a master's degree in "Sociology and Institutions of Politics" from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and holder of a BA in Political Science, with a minor in Economics from Paris 1 as part of the double degree program with the French section of the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences at Cairo University, Egypt.
At IbtikarKhana, Mariam works as a Case Manager, she’s responsible for managing the entrepreneurial journey of the social innovators. She’s in charge of following IbtikarKhana’s Monitoring and evaluation system through different tasks to monitor the social entrepreneurs and follow up their progress with the training coordinator.
After graduation, she started a Career in the development field. She worked as a Social and Professional support officer in a non-profit organization in France that works with refugees: Groupe Accueil at Solidarité.
Mariam has previously worked as an intern researcher and journalist at the Media Institute Zat Masr, she has also worked as researcher at the National Council for Human Rights. In addition, she has participated in social activities in university through student activities.

Mohamed Khalifa Financial Manager
Mohamed Khalifa has more than 11 years of experience in the field of accounting and finance.
At IbtikarKhana, Khalifa is responsible for all of IbtikarKhana’s financial matters including managing funds, processing payments and salaries, overseeing procurement and other expenses, and ensuring that all procedures for financial transactions follow those established by the donors and the local laws. He is responsible, in addition, for the financial reports submitted both to the donor, and the end-of-year audit report submitted to the government. Also, Khalifa collaborates directly with the Founder and Managing Director to strategize on long-term financial sustainability for IbtikarKhana’s sustainability plans so she can discuss it with the board of trustees.
Previously, Khalifa has worked as a Senior Accountant at the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women where he managed donor grants for a number of projects in partnership with Cement Helwan, Sawiris Foundation, the Federation of Banks and others.
He also worked as an auditor at Walid Khalil auditing office.
Khalifa holds a BA in accounting from Helwan University and he attended several financial training courses on taxation, time management, financial accounting, SME financial systems and micro-finance.

Angham Gamal Virtual Platform and Social Media Associate at IbtikarKhana
Angham Gamal is the Virtual Platform and Social Media Associate at IbtikarKhana. She has her BA from the Faculty of Mass communication at Cairo University where she specialized in journalism.
Previously, Angham has worked for a number of e-newspapers and she worked in the field of social media and media for a number of NGOs. She also worked as a media researcher for a number of civil society organizations.

Rasha Raslan
Rasha Raslan is a development expert with more than 17 years of experience in the fields of training, media and advocacy and project management. In addition to her work at ADEW as the Chairwoman Assistant, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer and Training and Media Manager, Raslan is an in-house trainer and mentor at IbtikarKhana. Rasha offers trainings to pre-early and early social entrepreneurs in the fields of: project management, social business canvas, proposal writing, monitoring and evaluation, pitching and presentations, market research and work plan development and she monitors the effectiveness of the trainings under the supervision of the Managing Director. Up to date, Raslan trained and mentored more than 170 pre-early, early and mid-stage social entrepreneurs as part of IbtikarKhana’s programs
Raslan’s training expertise includes media and advocacy, interpersonal skills, development concepts, gender, fundraising and donor management, project management, pitching and presentation skills, market research and capacity building for development professionals. Rasha designed and delivered a number of training programs to local, regional and global organizations such as Southern Mediterranean to Open Policy Dialogue and Monitoring for Women in Society Trainings, Om Habibeh Foundation, Tahrir Lounge, Goethe Institute and more. Raslan also offered monitoring and evaluation consultancies to a number of NGOs locally.
Rasha holds a Bachelor and a Master of Arts degrees in Mass Communication from Cairo University.

Jane Hanna Edutainer/public speaker/Associate trainer
Jane Hanna is the Incubator Manager of the Agri-Business Incubator and MashreQ Tourism Incubator at the Arab Academy Centre of Entrepreneurship. She has been the Founder and Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre for Social Impact and its Agri-Business Incubator “ESTEDAMA” at Heliopolis University. Jane is a Start-up Mentor at the GIZ 2WIN mentorship Program, ChangeLabs Impact Accelerator, and other programs.
Jane has been working as Innovation and Entrepreneurship Adviser for different academic institutions where she participated in developing and managing internationally funded innovation projects with progressive experience in managing business incubation programs.
Jane received a master degree from the University of Edinburgh, UK, an International Diploma in Euro-Mediterranean Innovation and Entrepreneurship from the Euro-Mediterranean University (EMUNI), she is a certified ILO trainer on “Helping Youth Creating Viable Businesses”.

Mona shahien Edutainer/public speaker/Associate trainer
Mrs. Mona Shahien has more than fifteen years of professional experience in development cooperation, curriculum design,development and management of monitoring and evaluation systems, assessments, action research, program management, international and governmental organizational capacity building including soft skills, and providing consultations as a researcher, trainer and facilitator in these areas for civil society organizations and governmental organizations locally and internationally and local embassies.
During her career she has designed and supervised hundreds of trainings in different fields, she is considered to be an expert in informal adult education ,besides blending different new edutainment methodologies in her own designed training programs.
Mona has had her TOT in the field of tolerance and coexistence from the Center of applied policies ,Munich Germany.

Marwa El-Daly
Marwa is reviving and modernizing the traditional model of giving and local resource mobilization known as the waqf in order to develop a more organized culture of philanthropy in modern Egypt. She has established the first modern model of a waqf, the Maadi Waqfeya, in order to test her idea and show by example how a local community foundation in the waqf tradition can succeed. Her three integrated revenue strategies are designed to secure long-term sustainability for the waqfeya and its projects and to maximize community participation.
The core “waqf” or trust funded by business entrepreneurs will ensure continuity and sustainability of the waqfeya. The second strategy is a campaign to get the more wealthy residents of Maadi to structure their charitable activities through the waqfeya, funding concrete development initiatives in the less advantaged parts of their own community. Less wealthy residents will follow this example, generating a new form of social responsibility. Thirdly, Marwa is partnering with new business enterprises offering them the waqfeya’s space and its credibility in return for a share of their profits to support the waqfeya and its development initiatives.

Waleed Shawky
Dr. Waleed Shawky is the founder and the chairman of the board of trustees of “Medicine for All Foundation” – the first specialized foundation in the field of medicine in Egypt and the Middle East. Waleed offers a collection service where he collects medicine of no need from companies and individuals, filters them based on their expiry dates and then distribute them to people in need.
Dr. Waleed Shawky is an Ashoka Fellow since 2013.

Amgad Morgan
Morgan founded Nabd Al Hayah for Social Development Foundation with aim of creating and growing a nation-wide citizen based movement that is able to systematically combine a nation-wide fight against blood diseases with the mobilization of blood donors across Egypt.
Morgan is the chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees and he is a computer engineer. Through his innovative venture, Amgad saves the lives of thousands of patients who need blood transfer on daily basis.

Usama Ghazali
Usama is an expert researcher in the field of documentation and local handcrafts. He has worked in the field of social development as a volunteer and as an expert for more than 20 years.
Usama worked as a researcher in natural reserves in the Eastern Desert and them he became more active with the local community and in documenting Egypt’s natural and cultural heritage.
He has launched a number of pilot projects to empower the local community to utilize and preserve the natural products and heritage. With his documentation team, Usama developed the first ATLAS for the handcrafts map in Egypt.
Usama won a number of international prizes in the field of social entrepreneurship from the British Council. California University and Al Doha Economic Forum. He also go the India Africa Fellowship from the Future Joint program between India and Africa.
In 2017, he started his consultations with Ibda’ initiative which is implemented by the Bank of Alexandria. He also volunteers with a number of NGOs and social enterprises in Egypt.
Usama is the co-founder of Yadawerya for Heritage and Handcrafts and he is an Ashokaa Fellow since 2015.

Nabil Al Mogy
Nabil Al Mogy is the CEO of the Egyptian Company for Natural Oils and he is an Ashoka Fellow.
Al Mogy was dedicated to plant the Jojoba plant for the first time Egypt and he extracted his oil to be used as fuel for cards and cars. He got 4 patents for the medical benefits of this plant.
Jojoba planet is a tree that produces mid-sized seeds on yearly basis and can survive hear and cold. Its original base is in Sonora desert in South West American desert.

Salem Massalha
Salem is a social entrepreneur with an extended experience in the field of marketing for social causes and digital marketing.
Through his venture, “Bassita”, Salem changes the concept of fundraising through using social media to mobilize resources and raise awareness on social projects.
Salem received a number of global innovation awards from France, South Africa and Egypt. He managed to reach 36,000 beneficiaries through more than 13 million social media users.