Our Schools

Since day one, our mission has been to create shared, sustainable growth for the communities that we’re a part of. In working closely with our farming partners throughout the Nile Delta and Faiyum regions, we developed on-the-ground, personal relationships. When we spoke with our partners about how we can best serve their needs, there was one resounding ask: quality and accessible education for their children.

Despite improvements through the years, schools are still limited in rural Egypt, inaccessible for many children. With limited schools comes limited opportunities for the next generation, and limited growth for the entire community.

Currently, of the world’s illiterate adults, 2/3 are women. While there have been global improvements in literacy rates, gender disparities persist. The share of illiterate women remains unchanged over the past 20 years.

Working with our partners, we learned that girls don’t always get the chance to attend school in rural Egypt. This can be due to a lack of proximity to schools, cultural norms, or their families needing extra hands to help on the farms. To empower young girls to experience equal opportunity, we’ve prioritized a 2:1 girl to boy student ratio in our schools.

In 2017, we opened our first primary school in rural Egypt from sales collected from every single order to date. The students attending this school are the first 37 people in their village to learn to read and write.

For Black Friday that year, we decided to skip the sale, and instead, we reinvested our earnings to fund our second school. Since then, we’ve donated 100% of Black Friday proceeds for 10 years in a row—helping fund twenty-five schools.

With every purchase, your orders fund the build-out and operations of school infrastructure and furniture, books and supplies, water and electricity, technical training and salaries for facilitators, and maintenance of the roads that link communities to our schools.