Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 81–98

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

4. The Road to the Egyptian Knowledge Bank

Interview with Tarek Shawki

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 81–98)
The Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB) was launched in 2016 to provide researchers, students, and the general public in Egypt access to state-of-the-art knowledge and learning resources on a digital platform free of charge. Tarek Shawki, Minister of Education and Technical Education from 2017-2022, was a driving force behind the EKB project. He recounts how the seeds of the idea for an open-access knowledge platform began when he was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1980s and 1990s, a time that coincided with the birth of the Internet. The idea continued to grow during his years at UNESCO as Chief of the Section for ICTs in Education, Science and Culture, and began taking concrete shape while he was Chair of the Presidential Specialized Council for Education and Scientific Research and then, Minister of Education. The EKB was initially supported by a presidential fund to serve the country’s goals of advancing its knowledge economy, but it faced opposition in parliament as being a ‘luxury’ good. Shawki addresses the future of the EKB, the challenges with funding and sustaining the project, how it has evolved into a publishing platform, and ways it has gained recognition outside of Egypt.

Contributors

Linda Herrera

(author)
Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project in Egypt and served as an international education advisor. A social anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and North Africa, her research and teaching cover a range of areas including education and power, youth studies, citizenship education and critical democracy, technology and society, and international education development. Her books include, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (with A. Bayat, University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with A. Bayat, Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (with C. A. Torres, State University of New York Press, 2006).