Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 171–186

Language

  • English

Print Length

16 pages

10. UNICEF’s Life Skills Framework Comes to Egypt

Interview with Manar Ahmed Sharouda

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 171–186)
UNICEF partnered with the Ministry of Education and Technical Education to help integrate its Life Skills and Citizenship Education (LSCE) framework into the new curriculum. Education Specialist Manar Ahmed Sharouda, recounts how the much-needed reforms prioritized early childhood education, play-based learning, and inclusive education. The process of turning ideas and policies into practice faced challenges due to difficult local conditions, the lack of a proper change management system and communication strategy, and absence of adequate evidence and data from the ground. Moreover, the reforms were pushed from the top without being coupled with a bottom-up approach here the school is the unit of reform.

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).