Sherife AbdelMessih, Spark Camp’s founder, believes that our country will never be more developed unless our young talents are nurtured and given enough attention in their attempts to find probable solutions for the country’s most pressing dilemmas.
This year, Spark Summer Camp targeted both high school and college students who were shortlisted and sent them official confirmation letters to spend a ten-day camp in El Gouna, where they’ll be given training sessions and one-on-one counsel on how to launch their start-ups.
The Boot camp was sponsored by Future Energy Corporation, where AbdelMessih also serves as CEO. Also, a number of very reputable guest speakers from various disciplines attended the camp to enlighten the young minds and talk about their prior experiences, the ones that truly shaped the thriving characters of today.
Most of the esteemed guest speakers were hard-core entrepreneurs, ones who spent years working to finally witness a noticeable boom in their businesses such as Rana El Kaliouby, CEO and Co-Founder of Affectiva, a company specializing in offering emotional recognition technology based on patented science and Ashraf Sabry, CEO and Founder of Fawry, a business that focuses on promoting financial technology by making financial services more efficient.
This year’s fledglings, whether high school or college students, were hyped up about sharing their business ideas, plans and works in progress. Some of the young change-makers were one step ahead of others since they were already in charge of running their own startups. One of which is the 20 year-old Ramy Omar, founder of School.inc, who managed to develop a mobile and desktop application that mainly deals with the student’s age, academic performance, study habits and specific hours to be devoted to reviewing the material.
Moreover, there was also 16 year-old Mohamed Abdelkhalek, the current president of an international non-profit organization that goes by the name Citizens of the World Society (COWS). His organization aims to encourage students to grow much fonder of the community service notion, not only in Egypt, but in Morocco and Nigeria as well.
In a community like ours, the conformity of the mind is the undercurrent of peer pressure. If someone quits his job and decides to follow his passion rather than maintaining a steady job that pays the rent will simply be dubbed a “moron”. However, with the possibility of supporting entrepreneurial summer camps like that of Spark, we’ve got a better shot of not only developing, but of exceling.