75 Years of Friendship and Exchange

On November 8th, 2021, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, the Binational Fulbright Commission in Egypt (BFCE) will host a special virtual alumni anniversary event titled “75 Years of Friendship and Exchange.” BFCE, which was established in 1949, is the oldest and largest Fulbright Program in the Arab World and Africa with an alumni network of over 8,000 scholars from Egypt and the United States. The Fulbright program in Egypt continues to experience remarkable growth, diversity of applicants and breadth of programs and fields. The virtual event will be open to the public and will be shared among our U.S. and Egyptian alumni.

The event will highlight the impact of educational and cultural exchange between the U.S. and Egypt and acknowledge the achievements of the program’s alumni, which will be reflected in a virtual certificate ceremony to celebrate the safe return home of 63 alumni who have finished their program in 2021. The ceremony will showcase the diversity of the alumni network and their wide reach, as well as the significant impact of the Fulbright Program offerings. The 2021 alumni cohort come from 18 Egyptian governorates and have spent their Fulbright experience in 25 different states in the U.S. They have studied and conducted research in 31 different fields of study. During 2021, the Fulbright Commission also hosted a Fulbright U.S. Specialist at Badr University, in partnership with Suez Canal University and El Galala University and has started welcoming its incoming AY2021-2022 Fulbright U.S. scholars and students.

BFCE Chair, Egyptian Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Professor Ayman Ashour and Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and BFCE Treasurer, Ms. Lauren Lovelace, will give welcoming remarks. The keynote will be delivered by Fulbright Commission in Egypt alumnus, Mr. Ahmed Issa, Chief Executive Officer of Retail Banking at CIB – Egypt’s largest private sector bank and three-time winner of the Best Bank in Emerging Markets award. In 1997, he went on the Fulbright Commission administered Harvard Institute for International Development which was followed by an internship at Merrill Lynch. He then earned an MBA degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001 through a USAID-funded program.

The event will be live-streamed from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Cairo time (11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. EST) on Zoom and Facebook.