Gabarti Scholars

i was watching the news one weekend and couldn't stop thinking about why AI researchers were getting traded between labs like soccer players. openai to anthropic to google. over and over.

it made me think about egypt.

brain drain was the obvious answer for why our tech scene is so far behind. but brain drain doesn't just happen — people leave because the alternative at home isn't good enough. i ended up deep in a rabbit hole, as is typical for me on a weekend night, sifting through shoddy government websites and old forums trying to understand what "not good enough" actually looked like on the ground.

what i found was specific. egypt's team for the International Olympiad in Informatics — the IOI, essentially the world championships of competitive programming — couldn't find the funding to fly to Bolivia to compete. our best young programmers. the ones who spent years preparing. couldn't go because nobody put up the money.

if we can't support those kids, how are we going to support thousands of engineers?

i thought about the US for a second. technical students there get internship opportunities even in a market with a surplus of senior talent. egypt has the opposite problem — a talent deficit because everyone who gets good enough eventually leaves. so why couldn't we build the same pipeline here?

that frustration is what started gabarti scholars. but bolivia was the first thing i wanted to fix. it was concrete, it was urgent, and it was embarrassing that nobody had fixed it already.

hundreds of cold emails later, i raised the money. i'm still a little surprised it worked.

flying the team to bolivia was satisfying for about a week. then i started thinking about what happened after.

the real problem wasn't that our best students couldn't compete internationally. it was that when they came home, those achievements didn't translate into anything. no pipeline, no connections, no economic opportunity. they'd go back to the same environment that was slowly convincing them to leave.

the solution i landed on: recruit around 10 of the most talented high schoolers in egypt, match them to top local tech companies for software development internships, and connect them with people in the industry who could actually open doors.

250 applications in the first week.

i wasn't expecting that. neither was the industry. strong interest from companies, strong interest from students — a supply and demand mismatch that nobody had done much about.

a teenager with nothing but cold emails and too much time on a saturday night managed to surface all of this. which means the people with actual resources and influence have no excuse.

all 10 scholars got placed. we raised 500,000+ EGP to support them through the program.

gabarti is small right now. i know that. but the idea of making a dent — even a small one — in something this structural is what keeps me coming back every year.

i don't think i'll be satisfied until this isn't something one person running cold emails needs to do. until there's a real system, with real funding, that doesn't depend on somebody being frustrated enough on a saturday night to build it.

that's the goal. gabarti is the start.