Civil Society

Sawiris Foundation is proud to operate within a bigger civil society and communities of development practice. Our network of implementing partners and grassroot non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working within Egypt’s most vulnerable communities enable us to bring our impact to those who need it the most. Through our evidence-based funding cycles we earmark and channel resources towards interventions and proposals backed by scientific evidence and innovative interventions. This enables civil and developmental work to be focused on more impact and solutions to Egypt’s’ most pressing socioeconomic challenges.

We at Sawiris Foundation continuously strive to be in a state of symbiosis (mutual benefit) with the diverse Egyptian civil and development ecosystem. Through our capacity-building program, we work on building a supportive ecosystem that offers knowledge, best practices, and know-how that catalyzes developmental work and the ecosystem’s efficacy as a whole.

Who can apply?

NGOs eligible to apply must be part of Sawiris Foundation’s NGO BANK. To be part of our NGOs bank you must undergo an assessment and submit your application.

Every year, Sawiris Foundation will be releasing a limited call for concept notes in January. We will accept one concept note per implementing partner.

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Policymaker

The Foundation works closely with policymakers and government entities in carrying out projects and scaling up impactful interventions. We make available to policymakers the latest scientific evidence that empowers the most educated decision-making processes. Moreover, we advocate for the scale-up of the most impactful interventions and solutions that proved efficacy on the ground, to reach a larger number of vulnerable and poverty ridden communities and families. This focused impact-oriented grant making ensures efficiency and cost benefit with scarce and needed public funds and goods.

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Academia (Knowledge)

Sawiris Foundation commits to continued collaborative learning and mainstreaming the generation and use of rigorous scientific evidence in Egyptian policymaking. The Foundation closely works with research centers and think-tanks to extract and generate knowledge in its most rigorous forms to enable the best support to policy decisions and grant making. Strategic learning partnerships enable us to continue the production & dissemination of knowledge on the impact of key programs and interventions, and by thus enriching the wealth of knowledge and institutional intelligence for Egyptian civic and policy societies.

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Private Entities

The private sector is an indispensable partner in the ecosystem of development and especially philanthropic giving. Our key partners aiming to bring corporate social responsibility to the frontlines of social and developmental work depend on Sawiris Foundation as a gateway for impactful educated social investments. We also look forward to bringing innovative impact to together with social enterprises. Our philosophy in grant making favors deepening institutional partnerships and relationships with the private sector to thrive, scale and offer big push solutions to society’s most vulnerable communities and towards their most pressing needs.

Out of firm belief in the importance of aligning our work with other organizations working on reducing poverty nationally and internationally, we have carefully ensured that our strategy is aligned with the international Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the National Strategy for Sustainable Development “Egypt 2030 Vision” (MPED, 2016), as well as the national strategies of the Ministries of Social Solidarity and Education.

One of Sawiris Foundation’s principal values is inclusivity, and as we continuously invest in ensuring our own organization is inclusive on all fronts, it is necessary that the projects we fund also reflect this value. That is why certain themes will be mainstreamed across all projects and interventions funded by Sawiris Foundation through the 2023-2028 strategy. The three crosscutting themes are gender, diversity and inclusion, and climate change. We will reflect these crosscutting themes in our work policies, our project selection, design and implementation, and in the learning questions that we choose to evaluate

Gender

Gender equality is an essential theme in all Sawiris Foundation’s strategy and approach to development. Gender equality, besides being a fundamental human right, is essential to achieve peaceful societies, with full human potential and sustainable development. Being an essential theme to the foundation, Sawiris Foundation commits to adopt gender mainstreaming practices on various fronts. This approach aims to guide grant-making decisions and investment practices in a way that supports gender equality becomes a guiding principle for all implementing partners in their structure and in their projects.

We commit to ensuring that men and women have equal and equitable opportunities in setting goals, and in participating and benefiting from them. Sawiris Foundation will prioritize projects that are designed in a way that responds to the needs of all individuals within the household rather than benefiting one gender over another. The integration of the gender lens will be a necessary pillar against which concept notes and proposals are evaluated. Sawiris Foundation also seeks to suggest solutions and corrective actions such as skill building opportunities for implementing partners to support gender awareness and programmatic design based on our accumulative knowledge and the findings of our conducted evaluations.

Diversity & Inclusion

Diversity and inclusion are an integral part of Sawiris Foundation’s strategy and belief system. We strive to guarantee diversity and inclusion not only in its workforce but also throughout all its projects. Whereas the concept of diversity and inclusion is extensive, Sawiris Foundation focuses on disability inclusion and accommodation as a main cross-cutting theme throughout its overall strategy of 2023-2028. We ensure that all Egyptian communities are represented throughout all its projects and programs. In this regard, aligning with the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and international norms, we adopt the application of the social model of disability throughout all its supported projects and within our foundation whenever available and applicable.

The social model, being the internationally recognized way of addressing disability, contends that disability is socially constructed, i.e., disability is a result of an interaction between people with living impairment and the surrounding environment with physical, attitudinal, and social barriers. The social model of disability is based on the notion that a person is disabled because of the social barriers they face, not the physical impairment they have. It is contrary to the traditional medical model, which denotes that the person’s capability is limited based on their impairment. Throughout all its funded and implemented projects with partners, Sawiris Foundation work to ensure that the social model of disability is applied throughout all projects whenever available. In practice, we seek to include awareness topics of disability accommodation and including persons with disabilities within its capacity-building agendas for its partners and beneficiaries. Moreover, Sawiris Foundation’s goal is to ensure that all related projects are disability friendly and observe this social model of disability within their method of implementation, providing a barrier-free environment.

Climate Change

Sawiris Foundation is strategically placed to become a catalyst in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and poverty alleviation agendas. As an evidence-based philanthropic organization that seeks to reduce multidimensional poverty and empower agents of change in Egypt, we are gravely concerned about how the effects of extreme weather and the rising vulnerability to hostile natural conditions will affect the communities that we serve.

As part of this we see climate change as a cross-cutting theme that cannot be addressed by a single intervention but continued resilience building of the most vulnerable communities. We Included the impacts of climate change as a top priority to address in our programs. Starting from facilitating discussion among civil society In Egypt to understand why we should work on the impacts of climate change, our strategic priorities in this area, and how we can work with co-funding partners and implementing partners to mitigate, adapt, and prevent the effects of climate change on communities we work with.

We at Sawiris Foundation share the responsibility with our partners to push forward agendas that work to improve our understanding of climate-related issues that affect Egypt’s marginalized and vulnerable populations and to find urgent solutions that address the climate-poverty nexus.

In its aspiration of maximizing its impact on Egyptian society and furthering knowledge on what works best, Sawiris Foundation invests in the implementation of rigorous impact evaluations, strong monitoring systems, an evidence-based strategy, and continued organizational learning.

Internally, we are geared towards ensuring that we are practicing the philosophy of effective altruism within the Foundation. Through learning from findings and insights generated from tailored monitoring tools and evaluation of project impact and implementation, our organizational intelligence expands, and the Foundation integrates learnings into the review of our evidence-based strategy. Over the next five years, we are committed to gearing up our data collection system, monitoring and evaluation processes, internal and external learning systems, and successfully reviewing our strategy on a quarterly basis toward targeting and delivering the most successful programs to the most deserving.

With efforts geared towards learning and evidence-based practices, The Learning & Innovation (L&I) Unit identifies and mainstreams lessons and best practices both within Sawiris Foundation and collectively learning with the Egyptian development community. Sawiris Foundation is committed to collaborative learning and transparently sharing our lessons learned. This means that we will continuously disseminate key lessons, contributing valuable knowledge to the wider development community. Please refer to the publications page to access more information on blogs, podcasts, policy memos, roundtable discussions, conferences, and seminars.