Egypt’s Education Minister on U.S. Partnerships

Tarek Shawki is very familiar with how education works in both Egypt and the United States. The new minister of education for Egypt earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Brown University in Rhode Island, spent a year as a postdoctoral research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then served as a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics for 13 years at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, according to The American University in Cairo, where he had previously served as dean of the School of Sciences and Engineering. Now in charge of an education system that serves about 21 million students and more than a million teachers, Shawki is facing the challenge of helping educators and schools in his country adjust to the digital age. In this video, Shawki talks about the Egyptian Knowledge Bank, an education initiative in his country that includes several U.S.-based education companies as partners.