Eight years of programme tracking, five editors in Minya, twelve museums on the rota.

How it started.

Nada el-Boraey joined the Egyptian Ministry of Education's curriculum-development unit in 2007 as a junior officer responsible for the primary-school cultural-studies curriculum. By 2015 she was the senior officer responsible for the museum-visit component of the primary curriculum and was working directly with the major Egyptian museums' education teams on programme design. Her professional brief involved reviewing the museums' proposed programmes against the curriculum framework and signing off on the ministry's recommendation that primary schools include museum visits in the academic year. The ministry-museum review process was thorough on paper but the practical question — whether the programmes actually delivered against the curriculum design when school groups arrived — was left to the schools and the families to evaluate individually.

The index was Nada's answer in early 2018 after one too many conversations with frustrated primary-school directors whose class trips had not delivered what the ministry's recommendation framework had promised. The proposal was straightforward: an independent quarterly index that would rate the programmes against their published descriptions and against the experience of teachers and parents who had actually taken groups through them. The first issue went out in September 2018 with twelve programmes rated. By the end of the first year the rota had grown to forty-one programmes across eight museums; today the rota stands at eighty-eight programmes across twelve museums.

The five editors.

Nada el-Boraey — founder and lead editor. Born Mallawi 1981. Trained as a curriculum officer at the Egyptian Ministry of Education's training college (1999–2003) and then eleven years at the ministry's curriculum-development unit. Subject specialisms: primary-curriculum fit, education-team capacity assessment, the gap between ministerial recommendation and classroom reality. Signs the primary-school programme ratings personally.

Tarek Hassanein — secondary-school editor. Born Cairo 1986. Trained as a secondary history teacher at Cairo University (2004–08) and then nine years teaching at three Cairo secondary schools (a private school, a public school and an experimental international school) before joining the index in 2019. The varied secondary-teaching background gives him a uniquely calibrated view of how secondary students actually engage with museum education programmes.

Aisha Habashy — workshop and family-day editor. Born Asyut 1989. Trained as a children's museum educator at the American University in Cairo's continuing-education programme (2012–14) and then five years running the children's-programme studio at the Coptic Museum before joining the index in 2020. Her professional museum-education background gives her a perspective from the museum side of the table that complements Nada and Tarek's school side.

Mona Habib — accessibility editor. Born Mansoura 1985. Trained in special-education curriculum at Helwan University (2003–07) and then ten years at the ministry's special-education unit before joining the index in 2021. Reviews every indexed programme for its accessibility provision — wheelchair access, hearing assistance, cognitive-accessibility support, dual-language delivery for the museums that offer Arabic-and-English programmes.

Khaled el-Saady — research and data editor. Born Minya 1992. Trained as a statistician at Cairo University (2010–14) and then four years at the Ministry of Education's data-analysis unit before joining the index in 2022. Maintains the index's working database, runs the quarterly verification cycle, and writes the data-driven essays that accompany the December annual review.

The administrator, Salma Refaat, has handled subscriptions, accounting, the public correspondence inbox and the Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday office hours since 2019.

Cooperative governance.

The cooperative is governed by the five editors as an editorial board. Major editorial decisions require a four-of-five board vote. The chair role rotates between Nada, Tarek and Aisha on a three-year cycle; Nada holds the current term through December 2027.

Funding and editorial independence.

Reader subscriptions covered approximately fifty-eight percent of revenue in 2025. The Mallawi Cultural Foundation education grant — paid annually since 2019 under a renewable five-year agreement — contributed twenty-nine percent. The remaining thirteen percent came from small consultancy contracts the editors privately hold with educational publishers and curriculum-development clients, all declared in the December transparency note. No museum, ministry, advocacy organisation or commercial sponsor funds the index. Four sponsorship approaches have been declined since 2019, all from educational-tour operators wanting an association with the index's editorial brand.

The Mallawi Cultural Foundation is an Egyptian private foundation established in 2002 to support cultural-education documentation in Middle Egypt; its grants carry no editorial conditions.

The documentary stance.

The index documents what museum education programmes actually deliver to visiting schools and families. We rate against the four age bands; we describe the documented experience; we do not advocate for any specific museum, programme, age-pedagogy theory or curriculum framework. Where a museum's programme falls short of its published description, we record the shortfall openly. Where a programme exceeds its description, we record that openly too.

The Minya office.

The office is the first floor above the Saady papermaker's shop on Sharia Saad Zaghloul, two blocks back from the Minya corniche in the Corniche district. The office has four rooms: reception, the editors' working room with the quarterly verification table, the data archive room with the printed bulletin archive since 2018, and a small library of museum-education reference works. Office hours Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday from 10:00 to 14:00 Cairo time.

Visiting researchers.

Approximately fifteen visiting researchers come through the Minya office each year — primarily museum-education MA students from Helwan and Cairo universities, accessibility-policy researchers from advocacy organisations, and occasional museum education-team staff coming to consult the cooperative's verification records.

The reader-observer network.

The cooperative's most distinctive editorial resource is the reader-observer network — currently twenty-eight active teachers, eight parents and four home-schooling adults across Egypt who file structured observation notes when they take groups through indexed programmes. The network is the index's primary source of ground-truth information on what programmes actually deliver, as opposed to what museums describe their programmes as delivering. We pay an honorarium of EGP 200 per accepted report; the honorarium is small but the network's editorial contribution is substantial. Recruitment for the network happens through word-of-mouth at the schools the editors visit during the verification cycle, and the cooperative is always seeking additional teacher-observers, particularly for the secondary-segment subjects where the network is currently underweighted (technology, sciences, business studies).

The Egyptian education-policy context.

The index operates within the broader context of Egyptian education policy, which has been undergoing structural reform since 2018 alongside the wider modernisation of the curriculum framework. The Ministry of Education's 2018-19 curriculum revision (the "Edu 2.0" framework) repositioned museum visits as an integrated component of the primary curriculum rather than the optional add-on they had previously been. The index's founding in late 2018 coincided with the framework's first year of implementation, and the cooperative's working brief reflects the framework's emphasis on documented, age-appropriate, curriculum-aligned museum experiences. The Edu 2.0 framework has been substantially revised three times since launch; our methodology document is revised annually in step with the curriculum framework's revisions to keep the curriculum-fit assessments current.

Visiting researchers and the corrections archive.

The Minya office hosts visiting researchers throughout the academic year — primarily museum-education MA and PhD students from Helwan, Cairo and the American University in Cairo, accessibility-policy researchers from advocacy organisations, and museum education-team staff coming to consult the cooperative's verification records. Approximately fifteen visiting researchers come through each year. The archive room holds the printed bulletin archive since 2018, the cooperative's bound corrections log, the reader-observer report archive (anonymised and indexed by museum and programme), and a reference shelf of museum-education and curriculum-development publications. Visitors are welcome by appointment and asked to log their visit in the office visitor book.

Eight years of cumulative impact.

The index has been published continuously since September 2018 — eight years of quarterly indexes, monthly bulletins and annual reviews. Across that time the cooperative has produced approximately ninety-six monthly bulletins, thirty-two quarterly index updates, eight annual season reviews, and the ongoing corrections log that now stands at one hundred and twelve entries. The index is cited in the Egyptian Ministry of Education's annual school-visit recommendation framework as one of its informal references, and in the academic literature on Egyptian museum education by approximately twenty published journal articles since 2020.

Correspondence.

Write to [email protected] for any matter. Telephone Salma on +20 86 4127 638 during office hours. Postal correspondence to the Sharia Saad Zaghloul address. The index reads every message and replies; response time is normally two working days for routine matters and longer for substantive programme-rating questions.