Entrepreneurs in Egypt: Abdullah Amer

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 In News

Young entrepreneurs in Egypt are part of a new wave of self-employment sweeping the nation, and Mostafa Shahat writes about them.


The only way for university students to increase their employability is either an internship or volunteering opportunity. The job market is very competitive, especially for fresh graduates, so being fluent in a second language becomes key as one of the main job requirements for whatever the field or/and position.

Abdullah Amer is a social entrepreneur, motivational speaker and TV presenter who believes that his contributions and efforts to his community are an essential part in his life. His mission is to help young people find their life’s vision.

Abdullah studied at the Faculty of Languages and Translation at Al-Azhar University in 2009, and he founded Spread Your Skills (SYS) as a student club in 2011. The main goal of SYS is to help university students become qualified for the job market by offering career development training programmes and English language courses.

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Abdullah and his team at SYS have successfully trained more than 15,000 students in more than 100 trainings programs and workshops in the last four years. Because of his academic achievements and excellent leadership, Abdullah has been awarded with a US Department of State scholarship to study for a year at Central Missouri University. Though he was studying topics that didn’t relate to his field of study back home, he enjoyed the experience and it benefitted him a lot.

‘I always love to discover new topics and themes’, says Abdullah. ‘It was my first time traveling aboard, but I was not shocked by American culture. Their education system helped me to expand my horizons and think always out of the box’.

In 2010, Abdullah co-founded Spread Your English (SYE), one of the most successful English training centres in Egypt. Abdullah has worked as English teacher for the last five years at SYE, where he has delivered training to about 2,500 students and graduates in more than 120 classes.

Abdullah has been invited as a motivational speaker in more than 100 events all over Egypt, sometimes having upwards of 70,000 attendees. Abdullah used to work with Huda TV as a presenter to speak about morals and human development topics, and he has recorded more than 100 live episodes.

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In 2015, Abdullah founded English Capsules, a social enterprise that provides English language training along with outdoor activities, offering one-to-one coaching to help define their strengths and weaknesses and build a personal development plan.

They also organise trips and outings where students can practice speaking English with native speakers and offer public speaking and business English courses.

‘Despite that we just started three months ago, we succeeded in training more than 250 students and organising eight trips and outings…We are building an interactive English learning community and inventing new techniques to teach English easily to students’.

Abdullah is organising monthly talks, called Capsules Talks, where he is interviewing professionals in different fields, like social media, marketing and human resources, and having open discussions with them in English in front of audiences who can interact and ask questions.

Abdullah also has partnerships with five international companies in Egypt to send their employees to attend English courses. About 700 employees have attended the English Capsules courses.

Abdullah is always recording educational learning videos where he is teaching new English words and verbs in an interactive way, and he has more than 20,000 views across the Middle East and Gulf countries for his recorded videos.


Article submitted by Mostafa Shahat, the volunteer responsible for Arabic guest bloggers in the MENA region and an entrepreneur who has established one of the most successful youth communities in Egypt, Goal Oriented Learners. Mostafa studied social entrepreneurship in USA and is currently the Middle East & North Africa representative at StudySearch (Nigeria) and the Egypt representative for All Events in City (India). Mostafa is also a reporter at Nudge Sustainability Hub. Email him at mshahat@golteam.org and check out his other blog A Syrian’s Success in Egypt and more from his Entrepreneurs in Egypt series.


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