Ahmed Dawoud

September 2017, a major turning point in my life. I joined The Egyptian Center for Economic Studies with overconfidence in my technical abilities and research skills. At that time, I was unaware that being a high-performing student does not automatically translate into being a good researcher.

After two months, I was assigned to my first research project in cooperation with the ministry of health, the world bank, and the United Nations population fund. The project was meant to develop a new population strategy for Egypt. When the team started discussions, I struggled to follow their conversations. I experienced a major shock, completely lost my self-confidence, and was terrified of losing my job.

Being a first-generation student who came from a poor rural family, it was a heavy responsibility. My parents invested their entire lives in my education. For them, a well-paying job was the only way to break the vicious circle of poverty that we lived in for decades.

It was a quite intense period. I was required to build a regression model that explains the determinants of high fertility in Egypt. It involved econometric techniques that I have never implemented before including instrumental variables, regularized regression, and fixed effects. In order to cope up, within two months, I completed 3 books in basic, advanced, and applied econometrics written by Gujarati and Wooldridge. More than 3000 pages along with Stata applications.

I was, and have always been, very hungry for knowledge. I remember going back and forth between the books, Stata tutorial on YouTube, econometric courses on Edx and Coursera, and liner algebra and calculus courses from MIT Open Course Ware. In just three months, I was able to thoroughly discuss the topic with subject matter experts in the field without them suspecting I was a junior.

Slowly but steadily, I regained my confidence. During the following 5 years, I successfully managed several projects and authored more than 10 publications covering a wide range of topics related to the Egyptian Economy, such as public finance, manufacturing and exports, taxation of digital economy, labor market dynamics, and the informal sector in Egypt.

June 2018, a second turning point in my journey. While I was looking to improve my modelling skills, I came across the MITx micro master’s program in data, economics, and development policy. I learned about the process of data driven decision making in a microeconomic setup using experimental and non-experimental methods including randomized control trials, difference in difference, and regression discontinuity design.

I strongly believe that learning advanced causal inference techniques is of critical importance, especially during this sensitive period in Egypt’s history. The government is launching several structural reform programs that should be thoroughly evaluated. However, there is a severe lack of qualified professionals working on causal data science in specific. Through my role at ECES I can, with the proper training, provide the badly needed support to the government to make well informed decisions.

March 2020, the third transformation point. With COVID-19, work from home, and the subsequent boom in online learning, I have had enough time and resources to sharpen my data manipulation, modeling, and visualization skills. I completed more than 20 hands-on training courses on Tableau, Python, and R including google data analytics certificate, deep learning specialization by Andrew Ng, and advanced data analytics from Udacity.

With the accumulated knowledge and experience, in September 2021, ECES administration decided to establish an applied data analytics unit under my supervision. The unit launched a unique project that addresses the chronic gap between labor supply and demand in Egypt. The project is sponsored by the National Bank of Egypt, The Ministry of Higher Education, and the American University in Cairo.

We successfully built a web scraping system that efficiently collects 60 thousand trustworthy job posts on a quarterly basis. The data is then cleaned, encoded, and analyzed to inform the government, universities, and all other stakeholders about the most in demand skills in the Egyptian labor market. The results are made publicly accessible through a fully interactive dashboard.
Along the journey, I have been never forgotten my parents and their peers of poor villagers. Giving back to my community has always been a key priority. In 2017, I established a non-profit nursery at my village in order to eradicate the profound roots of illiteracy and create a new well-educated, and more productive generation. Today, there are more than 300 children studying a highly innovative curriculum that we are continuously developing.

In 2020, I started a nonprofit organization to provide education and health assistance for underprivileged villagers. The organization already provided direct monetary support to more than 1500 families. In addition to covering the education expenses of more than 15 students, 3 of them successfully completed high school and joined university.

Currently, I can see without doubt that Egypt suffers a sever lack of data science practitioners who are working on social problems. At the same time, I feel that I have reached a limit regarding self-study, I need to take my skills to the next level, and I am sure that the master’s degree will equip me with the right hands-on research experience that enable me to make a significant difference in the lives of my family, my fellow poor villagers and most importantly my country as a whole.