Department of Management
Faculty
- Laila El Baradei
Office: 809 A Jameel Center
Phone: 797 6984
Email: lbaradei@aucegypt.edu
Dr. El Baradei is originally a graduate of A.U.C. with a B.A. degree in Business Administration with highest honors in 1983 and an M.B.A. in 1988. She received her Ph.D. in public administration from Cairo University in 1998.
Her areas of teaching include development management, international cooperation management, strategic management, organizational behavior, human resource management and research methods for public administration.
Her research interests are varied and have been manifested in a number of published articles and book chapters in the areas of decentralization, organizational change, public administration reform, governance, child labor, downsizing, and accountability.
Dr. El Baradei was a member of the authors’ team responsible for Egypt’s Human Development Report 2004, Egypt’s Millennium Development Goals Second Country Report 2004, and the World Bank’s Country Environmental Analysis for Egypt published in 2005.
Over the years, Dr. El Baradei has provided consultancy services to a number of reputable organizations such as the World Bank, USAID, UNDP, DANIDA, Center for Development Research in Bonn, the Economic Research Forum in Egypt, and Ford Foundation.
صور ليلى البرادعي كمان وكمان
تهون صور ليلى البرادعي كمان وكمان ،لوتقارنوا صورها بفضائح العيلة المباركسوزانية الصهيوصليبية وشذوذ أفرادها وإقترافهم لكل المعاصي،ولمبارك الصهيوني وأولاده المخول الصهيوني،أقول،ياأولاد الأفاعي،إذا كنتم وأمكم وزوجاتكم بلاخطيئة،فلترجمواسوزان المجدلية بحجر صوان!
I chose to study Business Administration because in 1979 this was the prime time for the Open Door Economic Policy of Sadat, business was thriving and I wanted to study something that would help me secure a good job and earn a living. My dissertation topic built a lot on my experience as a program manager for the Donors Coordination Unit at the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA). And yes there were serious problems with how aid was managed on both the donors’ and the recipients’ sides. To cite just a few of these problems, on the donors’ side, many a time there were clear political agendas that overshadowed the developmental agendas, overspending on feasibility studies and expatriates’ compensation, complicated rules and procedures that differed from one donor agency to the other, and lack of sufficient transparency in dealing with the recipient party. Q: Since you've done some interesting consulting work, I now have a few questions about that. In one case you were a consultant about civil service reform in the Ministry of Economics. How much reform does the Egyptian civil service need, and how quickly can it be done? Q: Along with your GAPP colleague Jennifer Bremer, you also wrote about developing Master's Programs in Public Policy and Public Administration in Egypt. How many such programs currently exist, and how many do you think Egypt needs? !!سالم القطامي
تهون صور ليلى البرادعي كمان وكمان ،لوتقارنوا صورها بفضائح العيلة المباركسوزانية الصهيوصليبية وشذوذ أفرادها وإقترافهم لكل المعاصي،ولمبارك الصهيوني وأولاده المخول الصهيوني،أقول،ياأولاد الأفاعي،إذا كنتم وأمكم وزوجاتكم بلاخطيئة،فلترجمواسوزان المجدلية بحجر صوان!Faculty Bulletin
Promoting Research at the American University in Cairo
Laila El Baradei
June 16th, 2010
Laila El Baradei, Visiting Professor of Public Administration and Associate Dean for the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, presented joint research with Kathryn Newcomer, Director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration (TSPPPA), George Washington University in the U.S., and Sandra Garcia, Assistant Professor at the School of Government, University of Los Andes in Colombia
The title of the presentation was "Strategies to Improve the Effectiveness of Evaluation of Nonprofit Social Service Providers." The presentation took place as part of the U.S. State Department Third Annual Conference on Program Evaluation: New Paradigms for Evaluating Diplomacy in the 21st Century, 8-9 June, 2010, Washington, DC.
The title of the presentation was "Strategies to Improve the Effectiveness of Evaluation of Nonprofit Social Service Providers." The presentation took place as part of the U.S. State Department Third Annual Conference on Program Evaluation: New Paradigms for Evaluating Diplomacy in the 21st Century, 8-9 June, 2010, Washington, DC.
profile: Laila El Baradei
May 12th, 2010
Laila El Baradei is Associate Dean of AUC's new School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (GAPP). She first taught at AUC in 2006, but was already no stranger to our university: she received her Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from AUC with Highest Honors, and also holds her M.B.A. from AUC. Since the foundation of the School of GAPP she has become an increasingly visible figure on campus, and as the sister of an especially prominent Nobel Prize winner she also enjoys an added degree of international visibility.
Laila took a break from her very busy schedule to answer some questions from the Associate Vice Provost for Research. Among other things, she tells us how her career paths was shaped both by the economic policies of President Anwar Sadat and by a bout with yellow fever during her graduate studies. She also touches on her family history of political activism, and gives an eyewitness report of what a Nobel Prize ceremony is like.
The photo prior to the interview comes from the ARADO Tunisian Conference, and shows Laila receiving an award in recognition of her acting as the Technical Advisor for the Conference over the past four years.
Q: In 2009 you joined AUC as Associate Dean of the new School now known as Global Affairs and Public Policy (GAPP). What interested you about this post?
I joined AUC earlier as a part-timer in 2006 and then starting September 2007 I became a full time visiting faculty in the public administration unit within the Management department, seconded from the Department of Public Administration, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University. When the restructuring effort at AUC occurred, and the new School of Global Affairs and Public Policy was created, Dean Nabil Fahmy offered me the post of Associate Dean.
What interested me most about the new post were the challenges it represented. From a career development perspective, it was a challenge taking on an administrative job in parallel to what I am accustomed to in terms of teaching and research. From an academic perspective, it was also challenging because of the interdisciplinary nature and relative novelty of many of the disciplines planned to fall under the umbrella of the new School. For one, Public Policy is a relatively new field in Egypt and although several programs in Egyptian public universities may deal with the study and research of public policies, yet there is currently no special degree with that title offered.
Among my first responsibilities on the job was helping out in the development of the Strategic Plan for the School: a task I enjoyed doing since it is in congruence with my teaching and research interests. Now nearly one year later it is very rewarding that we are moving on with the implementation of the plan and a lot of the once planned outcomes are materializing.
Q: We are proud to notice that you received your B.A. and M.B.A. degrees from the American University in Cairo. Which of your most influential professors from those days are still here as your colleagues?
I am also proud to be an A.U.C. graduate. In 1979 I entered A.U.C. and received a full Presidential scholarship because I had ranked 4th on the national Thanaweya Amma exams. This covered full tuition expenses which were in those early times less than 300 L.E. per semester.
I was lucky to experience a good number of excellent professors in the Business Administration major, which was offered for the first time in that year. Among my most honored professors who are still serving AUC students are, in no specific order: Dr. Medhat Hassanein (Finance Guru), Dr. Shawky Farag (Accounting), Dr. Samir Youssef (Human Resource Management), Dr. Sami Akabawy (Management Information Systems), and Dr. Amr Mortagy (Operations Management).
The lessons I learnt with Dr. Hassanein about the time value of money and the calculation of the Rate of Return on Investment (ROI) were most valuable to me when I worked in Hong Kong Egyptian Bank (HKEB) right after graduation.
I remember very fondly as well Dr. Sabry Shabrawy (Marketing) and the many heated discussions, debates and arguments he used to provoke us with in his very lively classes.
Other than the Business Administration major, I studied nearly four psychology courses with the late Dr. Ciaccio and I loved his classes. I remember how my family members, especially husband, used to suffer from my over-analysis of everyone’s behavior during my enrollment in the psychology classes. Whenever someone said or did anything, I had to classify it either as a ‘slip of the tongue,, or ‘defense mechanism’ or a symptom of a ‘psycho-somatic disease’!
Q: Is it safe to say that your career plans at the time involved business? And if so, what is it that shifted your focus during your doctoral work at Cairo University, which was in the field of Public Administration?
Admittedly, during my first business course when I came to realize that the main objective of any business organization is to ‘maximize profits,’ I was truly taken aback and spent many a sleepless night wondering what have I got myself into. It took me some time to adjust to the idea.
Thus the shift to public service was more or less a natural one and I would say more in line with my liking. However, there was also an element of chance in my shift of decision. The natural follow up to my MBA was to continue with a doctoral degree in the Business field. At one point in time I registered for a Ph.D. program at the Faculty of Commerce at Cairo University, but during the first week of study fell sick with yellow fever and had to withdraw my papers. Several years later in 1991 the department of Public Administration at the Faculty of Economics and Political Science was created and in 1994/1995 I was among the first group of doctoral students who enrolled in the program.
Q: Your doctoral thesis was entitled: “The Management of Foreign Aid Directed to the Field of the Environment in Egypt: 1985 -1995.” What conclusions did you draw about this topic? Were there serious problems with how the aid was managed?
Meanwhile on the recipients’ side, there were poor negotiation skills and over-acceptance of any donors’ assistance, whether there was a real need for it or not, just for the sake of having it show on the annual record of achievements for the governmental body or agency.
Q: In your thesis you covered the period up to 1995, and the thesis was defended in 1998. Are there problems in getting sufficient access to data about a topic so recent? I would have thought that many records would remain sealed for a long time.
As I mentioned before, my work at the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency facilitated my having access to the donors’ records. I covered a ten year period that started in 1985 and ended in 1995, which was the date at which I registered my topic. An outsider would have found it difficult to have access to the same data and this is what I always advise my students with. When they are doing field research they have to think first of all of whether they can have access to data and how.
The Egyptian civil service is in dire need of reform. The problems of overstaffing, low compensation and corruption are all interrelated. To cut a long story short, there is a need for a strong government to implement true reform; a government truly elected by the people that can shoulder the burden of making the needed decisions without fear that this will impact its short term popularity.
Dr. Safwat El Nahas, the President of the Central Agency for Organization and Administration who is responsible for managing the six million Egyptian government employees, visited AUC a few weeks ago in May 2010. He mentioned that thousands of employees employed in the Agricultural Reform Authority and in the Nubian Antiquities Protection Authority have nothing to do, because both these organizations were created more than fifty years ago for a specific mandate that has now been fulfilled and done with. However, these employees in both agencies still continue to receive raises and bonuses and the government does nothing about it. Personally, I found this information shocking!
Q: Let's turn now to some of your publications. In some fields, academics write articles that only specialists would care about, but the advantage of your field is that any intelligent person would be curious about your topics. For instance, you have written on child labor in Egypt. How can the problem be solved when there are so many poor families who expect additional income?
The goal of the Government of Egypt is not to completely eradicate child labor but rather, more realistically to work on alleviating the phenomenon, making the working conditions safer for the child and ensuring that working children do not have to skip school.
Child labor in Egypt has both cultural and economic implications. Families send their kids to work because they need the extra money to support themselves. To convince them to do otherwise they have to have alternate sources of income generation and for this to happen they need to develop their skills and abilities. Thus a better education and a higher income for the families are the most important pre-requisites for dealing with the problem of child labor.
Q: You recently published a co-authored article about Reforming the Pay System for Government Employees in Egypt. I think one of the main questions related to that issue is how to make available the extra funding necessary for increasing government employees’ pay. Did you discuss this issue?
Yes, for sure. Making available extra funding was perceived as one of the main strategic issues for reforming the pay system, in addition to also ‘right-sizing’ the government bureaucracy, increasing the level of transparency regarding ‘allowances’ received, reducing wage discrepancies, modifying minimum wage and linking pay to performance.
Where to get the money from, the study proposed a number of logical solutions such as cutting back on corruption at all levels, better management of government assets and resources, reducing expenditure on armed forces and police perks, and rationalization of top level government officials expenditures, among other measures.
Q: An interesting title in your list of publications has to do with ‘parallel systems’ in the government bureaucracy? What do you mean by that?
By parallel systems I am referring to the plethora of project implementation units (PIUs) and technical offices available in the majority of Egyptian ministries and agencies, which are basically funded by donor agencies, hire young qualified staff at higher remuneration than the traditional civil servants, and which are mandated to provide policy support to the minister. The establishment of these PIUs within the traditional government bureaucracies is a very much debated issue. They are excessively used by donor agencies as a short-cut to implementing reform but at the same time they lead to feelings of rivalry and animosity from the traditional bureaucrats and more importantly they are not sustainable. Thus, they should be used with caution, only when there are no other alternative mechanism possible, and only as an interim measure for the purpose of catalyzing, not implementing, reform to avoid duplication.
Besides the Public Policy and Public Administration program at AUC, there are three other masters programs at Cairo University, Sadat Academy and the Arab Academy. The Master’s of Public Policy to be offered at AUC starting next fall will be the first such program in Egypt. Although public policy has been studied under various disciplines before, this is going to be the first time that there is a special degree with this title offered.
As for how many Public Administration and Public Policy programs Egypt needs, I think it is not a matter of quantity but rather quality that matters most.
Q: Since your research is so focused on crucial public policy issues, I wonder if you ever considered work for a government ministry rather than in academia. What is the reason for your career choice in favor of the scholarly life?
I worked for a number of years in the Technical Cooperation Office for the Environment which was affiliated with the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency and my job helped me not only in collecting data for my dissertation, but also in gaining practical experience and insights into government work that is very useful for my academic career right now.
I love my career in academia for one main reason: my ability to voice my opinions freely. In any conference or official gathering I attend, I find that academics are the most powerful because they are the ones who are capable of expressing themselves freely without worrying about the position of the organization they belong to, or what their managers would think!
Q: Interest in public policy obviously runs in the El Baradei family. Was this true even when you were young? And what was it about the intellectual atmosphere of the family that pushed your focus toward political questions rather than some other field?
I think yes, my family may be categorized as one definitely interested in politics and in public policy. My late father as a lawyer and as a President of the Egyptian Bar Association for nearly five terms –non-consecutively- led his life fighting for fairness, justice, and the rule of law. He never feared speaking truth to power and during Nasser’s era especially, to put it mildly, he was never a favorite with the regime. Among his views were the abolishment of the 50% quota in parliament for workers and farmers because of its non-constitutionality, and he was one of the first advocates for the return of political parties during Sadat’s era, when there was still one political institution known as the Arab Socialist Union. Over lunch, it was common for my father to share news of his law cases or elections at the Bar Association.
Interestingly, a colleague of mine at AUC brought to my attention a book sold currently at the bookstore -at a 50% discount- entitled: “Egypt After Mubarak” where in one of the first chapters the author mentions my father’s efforts in the early 1970s in calling for constitutional reform… so yes, it seems it runs in the family.
Q: Most readers of this interview have probably never been to a Nobel Prize ceremony (neither have I). But in 2005 you had this opportunity, after your brother won the Nobel Peace Prize along with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he then headed. Such a rare experience. What stands out in your mind about that visit to Oslo for the Peace Prize ceremony?
I can tell you it was like a fairy tale and a dream come true. I was very proud of my brother and the moment in Cairo we learnt of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize was one of utter joy and happiness.
In Norway, people lined up in the streets in front of the hotel waiting for him to appear just so they can salute and applaud him.
A funny thing is that I have another elder brother who resembles Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei to a great extent (same eyeglasses, moustache, and more importantly bald head) and the Norwegians kept confusing them and congratulating the wrong brother heartedly whenever they ran into him.
It was a week of festivities, including the formal award ceremony, a banquet dinner with famous actresses and singers (Salma Hayek, Julianne Moore and Damien Rice) which impressed my kids the most, and a concert attended by more than 6000 persons. Interestingly as well, not a single Egyptian media person showed up to the events, something which truly had the Norwegian organizers baffled. A year before when it was a winner from Kenya, they were facing problems organizing the media crowds who had come over all the way from Africa to cover the event.
Q: Since his return to Egypt, your brother has become perhaps even more famous than before. I'm curious as to how often you see him, and whether you discuss mostly politics, or mostly other things.
I see him whenever he comes to Egypt but we follow up over the phone and by email. He has always followed up on our news and is completely up to date with everything we are up to in Egypt. It is not just recently: he has always been concerned with the situation in Egypt and the quality of life for Egyptians. Despite the fact that there were rumors recently that our phones are rigged, this does not concern him at all. What he is concerned about are the deteriorating conditions in his home country, whether as regards education, health, freedom of speech, or democracy in general. He wants Egypt to be a better place and he thinks it is all in the hands of the Egyptians. We should become more proactive and I think he is right!
Laila El Baradei
April 24th, 2010
Laila El Baradei, Professor of Public Administration and Associate Dean School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, participated in the Arab Administrative Development Organization (ARADO) Conference on the Management of Arab-Arab Development Cooperation, Tunis, Tunisia, 20-22 April, 2010. Dr. El Baradei chaired a session and presented a paper entitled: "Arab Development Cooperation Funds: An Analysis of Status-Co and an Identification of Future Critical Strategic Issues”
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