It has been a couple of weeks since Malek and Zeina have been back at school, and to the pleasure of Nahla and Ahmed, their parents, things have been well-managed “thanks to a few apps.”

“We managed to keep them both at the international school that we chose on the basis of quality of education, proximity to the house, and the profile of the students that go to the school,” Nahla said.

For the past 10 years since Malek joined the school, followed by Zeina three years later, Nahla, a banker in her late 30s and Ahmed, an executive in a communications company, have been able to manage their budget in a way that has allowed them to allocate enough resources for the school fees and “everything else”.

The “everything else” includes school uniforms, supplies, snacks and a lunchbox, pocket-money, the school bus, and extra-curricular activities.

“At the time of the first devaluation of the Egyptian pound in 2016, Malek was in his very early school years, and to be honest we managed quite well. However, by this year, with the subsequent devaluations and the increased inflation and the increasing demands of the kids, things had become harder to manage,” Ahmed said.

While the joint incomes of the couple have increased as they have advanced in their careers and consequently in their pay, it has still been becoming “more and more pressing” during the past three years to “keep things for the kids as they were used to having them.”

“The last thing we wanted was to downgrade the lifestyle and education quality that we committed to when we decided to have children. They are not very young anymore, and it would have broken their hearts to wake up to a situation where they could not be where they used to be,” Nahla said.

This required a considerable tightening of the budget of the parents. However, this year “something more had to happen too.”

“We needed to resort to a loan to pay the school fees on time and in full as we are used to. We can still manage other things,” Ahmed said. “It was not just that we could not put aside the amount of money that we saved for the school fees every month as we were used to doing, but it is also that the schools have considerably increased their fees.”

Ahmed and Nahla had to decide whether to move their children to a less costly school or to ask the bank for a loan that would effectively increase the final amount paid for tuition. They decided to go for the latter. After consulting with several banks and several education funding apps, they decided on an app that was offering an interest rate that was not excessive and was on easy terms.

“During the past few years, several apps have appeared that help parents and students to get loans for school fees, with more and more parents finding themselves in a situation where they need financial packages to help with fees,” said Mohamed Al-Kammash, founder of EduCash, an app designed to provide loans for tuition fees.

 

Coming from the banking sector, Al-Kammash has noted the increasing demand for school loans. “Some schools do not allow the payment of fees in installments, and many have increased their fees considerably, especially the international schools, but also some of the national schools,” Al-Kammash said.

It was clear for him and his partners at the launch of EduCash a couple of years ago that with the continued economic challenges that many people are facing and “the fact that for most parents nothing is more crucial than the education of their children,” many more parents would need to opt for loans for the schooling of their children.

“We knew that parents were fighting to avoid downgrading the schooling of their children, and we decided that there was room for more school-finance applications. We launched the app in the second term of the 2022 academic year, and since then we have been getting more and more requests for loans,” Al-Kammash said.

He added that while a good segment of the requests EduCash receives comes from well-paid parents whose children are in international schools, there have also been requests from parents who do not fall within the high-income bracket with children in national language schools.

“We also have received requests from parents with children in state schools, but those are not so many,” he said.

“We have seen parents who just want a loan for, say, one third of the overall tuition for their children to avoid paying a big sum for the fees, and we have seen parents who are seeking the full tuition fees due to one hard year. We have been able to design packages for different cases,” Al-Kammash said.

“Given that we are providing loans at reasonable interest rates, we wanted to make sure that we were avoiding any abuse by people who might get a loan for some other purpose. Our policy is to transfer the money directly to the school in question through a bank,” he added.

 

FINANCIAL HELP: EduCash does not help parents with children in schools that require foreign currency payments for their fees.

“We are strictly confined to Egyptian schools, including international schools working in Egypt within the Egyptian education system,” Al-Kammash said.

During the past couple of years, EduCash has moved from just paying school fees to making loans for other academic institutions, including those providing computer or art courses for students with special talents.

“We are waiting for official approval before starting this phase because education in Egypt is never just about school fees,” he said.

According to Dalia, the mother of Naira and Ayla who attend a semi-international school, school bus fees have also become a concern, especially for children like hers who live far away from their school.

Both parents have jobs that require them to be in the office no later than 9am. Practically speaking, it is difficult for either of them to drive the girls to school and then go to work, and so a school bus was a convenient choice.

However, with the soaring fees for the school bus, last year Dalia decided to take turns with nearby parents who drive their children to the same school. “It was alright because I just had to worry about this trip for two days a week, but it was also hectic because I was under stress to drive to my office,” she said.

 This year Dalia and Wael decided to cut out some shopping items to provide enough money for a safe and affordable ride for their girls to school every morning.

Neither Dalia nor Wael was willing to pursue finding a single taxi-driver who would come to pick up the girls to get them to school and bring them back home again to avoid soaring school bus fees.

“This did not sound like a safe idea,” Dalia said. Nor would she feel comfortable having her girls go on their own using a smartphone taxi application. Again, this did not sound like a safe choice.

“We had to do this last year a few times, and I ended up being on the phone with them for most of their 50-minute ride to school. It was expensive in the end,” she said.

Wael has heard discouraging assessments of the minibus services used by the smartphone taxi applications. “People have complained that the buses do not show up on time at the designated pick-up points, and in any case we were not comfortable leaving the girls at unattended pick-ups away from home to end up on a bus with total strangers,” Dalia said.

This year Dalia and Wael learned of specific school-ride apps, and they opted for one that has proved satisfactory during the first days of school.

 

SERVICES: Bus14 is one of these new and expanding services.

According to Mohamed Bakir, its founder, the increasing fees for school buses and the fact that most schools insist on advance payments and that most children now have two working parents have created room for school-ride apps, especially since most children do not live near to their schools.

Wanting to bring something new to the market, Bakir decided that Bus14 would work with sedan cars rather than minibuses or buses to reduce the number of children sharing the same ride and reducing its length.

“When we were doing market research ahead of our launch in 2022, we learned that parents often complain about long rides on school buses and other service that get their children to school or back home when they are already exhausted,” Bakir said.

He added that by focusing on collecting no more than five children from adjacent houses or apartment buildings who go to the same school, his application has provided a service that many parents are happy with.

 

Given the fact that in most cases students need to attend private lessons out of school as well and that some need to keep to specific sports routines, Bakir decided that the service, which carries the number of his own school bus in the 1990s, would also cater for out of school engagements.

He explained that parents apply online, choose rides to and from school or one of these, and then choose other rides to private lessons or art classes or sports clubs or whatever if they want them. Bus14 then offers different methods of payment.

“Once an agreement is reached, we send the designated driver to meet the parents for their approval,” he said.

“The most important thing is that both Bus14 and the parents of the children can track their children on the road every single minute of the ride,” Bakir said. He added that parental reviews are required on a regular basis to assess the performance of drivers and the quality of the cars used.

Another school-related service that has been fast expanding online is private lessons after school. Over the past two to three decades, these have become essential for many school students, essentially those in the national education system.

“Private lessons are part of the school routine for many children, and my children have been having private lessons since they were in the last year of primary school,” said Hoda, the mother of three children, the last of whom is set to pass his Thanawiya Amma (secondary school certificate) this year.

 “It was always an ordeal to get the children back from school, give them time to have lunch, and then drive them to their private lessons and then to bring them back home again and make sure they do their homework,” she said.

It was during the pandemic years of 2021 and 2022 that some private-lesson centres and teachers decided to use technology to keep things going. Two of Hoda’s children would sit, one in the living room and the other in the dining room, to attend their lessons online.

“It was such a relief, not only because we wanted to avoid unnecessary encounters that could have increased the risk of infection, but also because we were spared driving around the city to go to the lessons,” she recalled.

When the pandemic came to an end, Hoda, like other parents, asked the centres if they were planning to keep the online service. “It was a relief to learn that many people preferred to keep the online service. It made such a big difference,” she said.

However, according to Ahmed Abdel-Aal, founder of Al-Dars, a private-lessons app, teaching online requires specific qualifications. “It is different in terms of communication skills and in making sure that the children are focused and are really listening,” he said. This is why he decided to start his project by training teachers on how to teach online.

In 2020, with the Ministry of Education moving towards the more general introduction of technology, Abdel-Aal recalled that more and more teachers “from across the country, not just Cairo, and from many schools, including state schools, were learning how to teach online.”

Eventually, Al-Dars had enough teachers to start its service providing online teaching for interested students whose parents are happier with this arrangement. “I think it is a lot more convenient, not just because it spares the students and parents from the commitment and expense of the rides, but also because it saves a lot of time and energy for the students,” Abdel-Aal said.

Moreover, unlike with private-lessons centres that require early bookings and, in some cases, insist on a minimum number of lessons, Al-Dars, like other apps, is more flexible in booking and payment methods.

Overall, students and parents say that online apps have given parents and students alike a wider range of choices and more flexibility. According to Nevine, the mother of three school students in Cairo, shopping online for supplies, school bags, and other things required by schools has proven to save time, avoid any off-list shopping by children, and save money.

“Online shopping for bags, a laptop, or a calculator is easier and better,” she said. “Online services have discount offers, and I can get everything I need with a few clicks on my phone. I don’t need to spend hours going round the shops with the kids as they pick up a long list of items. Everything is delivered to my doorstep,” she said.

According to Diaa Hassan, founder and manager of the school bags brand that carries his name, “even those who shop in stores like to go online to look for available items, prices, and special offers that most stores advertise on their social-media pages.”

This is the case even for those shopping on tight budgets, especially since in many cases online shopping allows for ratings and customer reviews.

With the currency devaluations and inflation, he said, more and more people have been forced to cut down on their expenses, and fewer and fewer have the economic flexibility to allow them to just drop by a store and pick up whatever items their kids may fancy.

“When parents go online, they get to learn of brands they might not have been familiar with and of upgraded models that they might not notice if they went straight to the store,” he said.

He added that his best-selling backpacks that come with matching pencil cases and lunchboxes have made him famous online, even though over 70 per cent of sales are not made online.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly