Who trains Egypt's teacher?

From the Egypt Human Development Report 2005:

The Ministry of Education, as the main provider of in-service teacher training, does not have the capacity to cater for the training needs of all employees, even within the traditional parameters. This has led to the adoption of the ‘one size fits all’ strategy whereby all teachers receive the same training at the same time irrespective of the wide variation of their qualifications (only 46% of employed teachers are graduates of Faculties of Education).

Others are filling in, namely international IT companies, most recently under the Egyptian Educational Initiative. I wrote a piece on it for qantara.de, trying to show how these companies take over government tasks – out of their own interest, but for the benefit of school teachers (at least those who participate), I believe.

Excerpt:

Independently of the current initiative, Intel plans to train an additional 650,000 teachers on its own. The company has thereby shown itself to be even more ambitions than other businesses active in the IT field in Egypt.

The Egyptian Ministry of Education presents a rather different, seemingly uninvolved image. Its press spokesman referred to the participating companies and the responsible department head in the IT Ministry. In the end, he refused to answer any questions about the program.

(This week google announced another cooperation with the Ministry of Education, bringing its products to students in Egypt.)