Personal Story

Mostafa Shahat young Egyptian entrepreneur who started one of the most successful youth initiative in Egypt called G.O.L (Goal Oriented Learners), Mostafa had a dream since he was civil engineer student, to help his community, he saw many challenges in his community but the one who decided to take actions for and starting searching for solutions is the unemployment problem.

G.O.L started in 2011, when Mostafa joined one of the US Dept. of state scholarships called SUSI (Study in the United State Institutes), where he learned how to start a community service project, deposit; it was his first time to travel abroad but communicating with a different language and meeting new people with different culture & religion were never an obstacle to him as he was very open minded and always accepts others differences. Mostafa was very keen to learn and network all the time, he studied social entrepreneurship at Connecticut University and met a group of inspiring entrepreneurs who were helping all the time by sharing their knowledge about how could they start their projects and the obstacles that they have faced during their journey.

The trip was only 5 weeks, but Mostafa had a dream since then, which is coming back to his country and starting his community project, G.O.L is a youth community that solves the unemployment problem in Egypt by offering a monthly training about career development, soft skills and social entrepreneurship, G.O.L has trained more than 8000 Egyptian youth since 2011 until now, G.O.L has implemented its programs at public & private universities, NGOs, libraries, culture centers for foreign embassies in Egypt and youth clubs.

“Mostafa is delivering Career Development program at Information Resource center – US Embassy in Cairo”

Mostafa has taken a major decision in his life, he totally shifted his career to social entrepreneurship, he joined Mercy Corps Egypt as a program assistant where he was supporting entrepreneurs who are working in agriculture sector by delivering training about business model canvas (BMC) and teaching them how to use BMC model to build their projects’ ideas before writing their detailed business plan. Then moving to IIE (International Institute of Education) to work as program specialist where he was responsible for delivering training to specific number of universities’ students who have been offered a scholarship by IIE to study in private universities in Egypt about career development and social entrepreneurship.

G.O.L was funded once by Ashoka Youth Venture, and one of the best rewards that G.O.L received is being selected to be part of AMENDS (The American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford) at San Francisco, USA, AMENDS is an initiative at Stanford University that enables some of the most promising youth change agents from across the Middle East, North Africa, and United States to learn from each other, advance their work, and share, through TEDx style talks, their ideas and experiences with the world, Mostafa has delivered a speech at Stanford university in April. 2014 about his incredible work that he has done in Egypt.

G.O.L has organized once an international camp at Bulgaria in April 2015 called “Youth Entrepreneurship through Sports” YES program with a Bulgarian partner called Champion Factory, it was once week program funded by Erasmus +, Mostafa was delivering training for 45 youth about social entrepreneurship & public speaking from all over Europe and Egypt was the only Arab country which participated at that camp.

Mostafa is currently representing two international companies in MENA region, first; All Events in City which is focusing on connecting event seeker with the event organizer, it’s Indian online marketing agency, and second; StudySearch which is a Nigerian company that supports students to study outside of their countries.

Mostafa has published G.O.L and his personal story at two different online magazines before Beyond the bombs and See change magazine, Mostafa has passion to write about the entrepreneurs’ success stories, he is currently working as reporter at Nudge where he published several articles (The power of social entrepreneurship, Co-working spaces in Egypt, and EYouth) and he used to work as reporter at Ayiba Magazine where he published as well several articles (Afropolitan Diary Mostafa Shahat, Entrepreneurship in Egypt and Empowering African Youth).

This article was published on 5th December 2015, for the International Volunteer Day at Global Education Magazine.