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The purpose of this article is to present the perspectives of international officials regarding partnerships between the Egyptian Ministry of Education and international organizations. Data of this article were gathered mainly from semi-structured interviews with twelve officials working for international organizations in Egypt. The article suggests that international organizations working on the pre-university education face serious challenges that undermine their efforts and affects the efficiency of their contributions and initiatives in a very negative way. It concludes with a set of recommendations that may be considered by the Egyptian policy- and decision-makers for enhancing international partnerships in education.

This paper discusses participation in the pre-university education sector by reviewing three stakeholders: Local communities, the Boards of Trustees (BOTs) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), their contributions to the sector, and their main challenges that prevent them from realizing more significant impacts from the perspectives of international organizations' officials. The paper adopts a qualitative method and builds on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with twelve international organizations' officials. The paper suggests that the lack of community participation has a lot of interactive factors within a very complex, complicated and demotivating context. It concludes with a set of recommendations that may be considered by the government of Egypt and the ministry of education for enhancing participation within the pre-university education sector.

This study focused on evaluating the School-based Reform (SBR) program, introduced by the Egyptian ministry of education in its national strategic plan 2007/2008-2011/2012, by exploring the perspectives of policy-officials at the central ministry. The study adopted an evaluative qualitative analysis approach with the aim of evaluating and reviewing the SBR program, identifying its strengths and weaknesses, and realizing some strategies that can be considered by policy-makers and key-players to enhance the future implementation of the SBR program in Egypt. It was built mainly on data gathered using semi-structured interviews with five policy-officials at the central level who are aware of the major current and future initiatives of the ministry, particularly those aimed at empowering schools and enhancing their autonomy. The study targeted the Egyptian pre-university education system, which is the largest in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) and among the largest in the world. The study addresses the issue of decentralization, described as one of the most important recent phenomena in education, under the SBR program.

We study the effect of private tutoring (PT) on parents' decision to work more using a sample from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey in 2012 and apply a semi-parametric recursive bivariate probit model to control for endogeneity. Our finding shows that PT increases father propensity to work overtime by about 2 percentage points (pp) and a father's propensity to work a secondary job by about 4 pp. The increase in mother propensity to work is significantly high where it reaches 27 pp. In the urban areas, the effect is insignificant for the father but exceeds 37 pp for the mother.

The layout optimization-based model is a significant issue for increasing the utilization rate of the wind farm and minimizing its cost per unit of power. For the accurate and reliable wind farm layout optimization design, a novel algorithm based on the hybridization of equilibrium optimizer (EO) and pattern search (PS) technique, named EO-PS, is proposed in this paper. The proposed EO-PS operates in two phases. The first phase implements the EO to explore the search space and reach the promising regions by using an equilibrium pool of elite particles, which contributes to maintaining the diversity of solutions. The second phase integrates the PS to guide the searching towards better vicinities and achieve a high-quality solution by using its detecting and pattern movements to boost the exploitation ability of the proposed method in the last steps. The presented EO-PS algorithm is implemented to deal with single and multi-objective optimization aspects of wind farm layout optimization using different wind speed scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is investigated on irregular land space in the Gulf of Suez-Red Sea in Egypt to achieve the optimal layout configuration of the wind farm, which is vital for possible practical planning trends. The comprehensive results and analyses have affirmed that the proposed EO-PS can achieve competitive performance compared to the other state-of-the-state methods, especially in terms of the solution' quality and reliability. • A novel algorithm based on the hybridization optimization approach is proposed. • The proposed approach integrates the merits of two schemes to achieve a high quality of solutions. • The optimization of wind farm layout addresses the optimum sitting among the wind turbines. • The Gulf of Suez-Red Sea in Egypt were used as a realistic case study in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have developed their coasts according to the requirements of their activities and the nature of their users on the basis of sustainability criteria through the provision of energy, the use of renewable resources, respect for the environment and other sustainability strategies. Although Egypt is distinguished from the rest of the global coastal countries with much potential for actual competition, it lacks the optimal utilization of these potentials on the one hand, and the need for integrated and conscious management on the other. One of the problems faced by cities in Egypt, especially coastal cities, is to direct investment to development in the capital by much larger proportions than to the development of these cities. The aim of the research is to identify sustainable strategies that may support and promote the achievement of sustainable development goals in Al-Arish city and then any other coastal city in Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Egypt, it has been obvious that most cities suffer from deterioration in all life systems of their built environments. Moreover, what makes the increases the problem is that the gap between theoretical systems and corresponding practical systems in which policies have always emphasized the physical aspects of development which is measured by how many cubic meters of reinforced concrete were poured, without addressing to what extent this development achieves livability with the intention of reaching the quality of life at which the community can live in symbiotic harmony with its urban environment. This paper aims to identify livable urban community principles and demonstrate how the concept of livability can enhance the quality of life in Al-Rehab city as a case study from the Egyptian context. Moreover, this study offers an assessment tool by which urban communities in Egypt could be assessed to figure out the livability situation and give recommendations about further improvements to achieve more livable communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodeterioration of mural paintings by Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus Fungi has been proved in different mural paintings in Egypt nowadays. Several researches have studied the effect of fungi on mural paintings, the mechanism of interaction and methods of control. But none of these researches gives us the solution without causing a side effect. In this paper, for the first time, a recent treatment by antibiotic "6 penthyl α pyrone phenol" was applied as a successful technique for elimination of Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus . On the other hand, it is favorable for cleaning Surfaces of Murals executed by tembera technique from the fungi metabolism which caused a black pigments on surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) alpha-308 and interleukin (IL)-10-1082 have potent inflammatory responses in the process of airway inflammation in asthma. The purpose of this study was to check for association of polymorphisms related to cytokine genes with susceptibility and severity of bronchial asthma in Egyptian children. Blood samples of 69 asthmatic children receiving treatment and follow-up at the Allergy and Respiratory Medicine Unit, Mansoura University Children Hospital, Mansoura, Egypt, were subjected to DNA extraction and amplification using polymerase chain reaction with sequence-specific primers for detection of single nucleotide polymorphisms in the promoter regions of cytokine genes TNF-alpha-308(G→A), IL-10-1082(G→A). Compared with normal controls, Egyptian asthmatic children showed a significant higher frequency of IL-10-1082 G/G homozygosity genotype (p < 0.001; odds ratio [OR] = 7) with lower frequency of G/A heterozygosity genotype among cases. This finding also was detected in cases with persistent asthma and eczema. These cases showed significant lower frequency of TNF-alpha-308 G/A heterozygosity (p < 0.05; OR = 0.44). Also, male cases, cases with positive family history, and those patients with persistent types of asthma showed a higher frequency of TNF-alpha-308 G/G homozygosity. IL-10-1082(G→A) G/G and TNF-alpha-308(G→A) G/G may be a contributing factor in susceptibility as well as severity of asthma among Egyptian children. Separate studies should be specified relating these cytokine genotypes to response to various modalities in asthma therapy. This study reports that IL-10-1082(G→A) G/G and TNF-alpha-308(G→A) G/G genotypes may be contributing factors in susceptibility as well as in severity of asthma among Egyptian children. Separate studies may be specified relating these cytokine genotypes to response to various modalities in asthma therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the social services rendered to families in Egypt. The cooperative society was established in Egypt in the year 1908 to raise the economic and social level of the people. This was a private movement until 1923 when the government recognized the existing cooperative societies and gave them legal status and borrowing powers. In 1940 they became part of the program of the Egyptian Ministry of Social Service. In 1928 there were 162 cooperative societies and in 1952 there were 2,200 societies serving the needs of 897,000 families. The Egyptian Ministry of Social Service introduced a Social Security Scheme in 1950. The scheme is financed exclusively through governmental funds and includes two main types of financial assistance to families: pension and public assistance. The Social Security Scheme provides for the establishment of a Public Assistance Fund from which grants can be given to needy individuals or families not eligible for pension. A great number of charitable organizations are engaged in the field of social welfare including the family area, but very few, if any, are conducted on a nationwide scale. All the non-government family welfare work is established in cities and is subsidized by the government.