The Three Musketeers

Amira Salah, Ahmed Yahia, and Mohamed Korayem are those three musketeers who created Kherna, a new charity and development portal. Kherna (literally “our prosperity”) is a social networking platform for charity and development that, despite being only five months old, already has 3,000 volunteers on board.

The three of them had always dreamed individually of better, more sophisticated and intelligent forms to help promote charity and development. But unlike a children’s tale, they didn’t wait for the fairy godmother to do the work for them. After much frustration with the way charity is conducted in Egypt, they decided to take matters into their own hands, and this is when the idea of Kherna was born.

“Whenever I wanted to volunteer my free time, I used double or triple the time I had in mind just to find the suitable NGO and activity,” explains Salah. “More often than not, I didn’t feel like I did much, they either had more volunteers than needed, or they chose a wrong population to help, or had few volunteers and even less money.”

Kherna is plotting a massive charity map of Egypt, one that will indicate the poorest areas, who is in need, what exactly is needed and how much longer can they survive without help. It is a guide for all NGOs and volunteers to know where they should go first. Kherna aims to optimize the nation’s charity and development life by making it as efficient as possible.

 “[Kherna] saves my time and energy from the hectic search for something good to do,” says Hossam Mohamed, a Kherna volunteer.

Approximately one year ago, after long sleepless nights of planning, creating and collaborating, the Kherna creators entered the “Masr El-Mahrousa” competition organized by Yahoo. They managed to land the Best Social Development Project Award in 2010, also landing seed money of around $30,000 (LE 178,815) from Yahoo to kick start the project.

The trio behind Kherna oozes with enthusiasm and high hopes for the country. There isn’t an area they don’t wish to tackle, be it poverty, healthcare or illiteracy.

The Kherna team is down to earth, welcoming and energetic, and the team spirit can be felt from the minute you set foot into their office in Heliopolis. It reflects their personalities: Post-its are all over the walls with various ideas, colors and plans for the future scribbled on them.

The team members are all tech-savvy, and young, with the oldest being Korayem, 28. Salah, a Ain Shams graduate with a degree in computer science, has an amazingly warm smile and optimism written all over her face. Yahia, recently graduated from the American University in Cairo (AUC) with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, while Korayem is a self-proclaimed “agile social entrepreneur and polymath in-the-making.” A graduate from Ain Shams University’s Faculty of Engineering, Korayem created his first social networking portal for students back in 2001.

The three of them met during their early years of employment in the digital marketing field, and after two years they founded the digital marketing department at ATech Company. They resigned just days before the revolution to start chasing their dreams and cofounded their own company, Social Fruits to create social platforms and serve as a social media consultancy. Kherna is Social Fruit’s first project

Kherna simply aims to help people with limited time and energy to schedule and make the best of their charity efforts in the most efficient and interesting way possible.

“Kherna integrates the offline world with the online world. It helps burst the bubble of the online world and know what’s happening around us,” says Farah Helmy, a Kherna volunteer.

Kherna’s second edition was released in July just in time to catch the spirit of Ramadan giving in full swing. Kherna allows volunteers to navigate through the different activities out there to see where they fit the most, and where they are needed the most.

The updated website comes with more enhanced and refined features that can help people organize their charity schedules, deliver appointment reminders to users and even allows users to share their experiences with the rest of the network.

The website also links users with different NGO’s and initiatives throughout the country. NGOs can add all their details, activities, different requirements and the number of volunteers needed.

Every week, Kherna allows volunteers to create a schedule of their free time and the activities they wish to participate in as well as their location. The website then generates a list of the most suitable activities for them, based on their interests, location and schedule. Volunteers alsoreceive periodical personalized notifications based on their profiles so they can sign up for events that are of the most interest to them.

Volunteers can place reviews, upload photos and videos, or even stream them live as activities occur to encourage others to participate. Volunteers then get to report to Kherna what they have done. To keep motivation high among the volunteers, each Kherna member earns points for every mission accomplished, with an informal competition to see who scores most.

Kherna is more than a simple directory or a scheduling mechanism. The volunteers can rate NGOs and vice versa, so that people know which organizations are really working, who really needs help and who has enough volunteers already. In a way, NGOs are also competing with each others, all in the public interest.

Even before the revolution, Salah and her partners always believed in the power of social media. “So when Facebook and Twitter helped the revolution happen and then succeed, we became sure that social media can develop Egypt’s charity life,” says Salah. “So we just have to utilize and use this massive amount of power to fit our purpose. And so we created Kherna.”

It was this strong faith in social media that motivated them to develop their project as fast as they could. And the revolution instilled that faith and fire in them. They had originally planned to launch the website by mid 2011, but the revolution started and suddenly everyone was looking for ways to help.

 “So we had to rush the launch of the portal, because the people needed it now and not in the scheduled time,” says Salah. “We realized people really wanted to change Egypt, so all we needed to do was give them a platform to communicate.”

The portal was originally designed to focus on NGOs and their needs, but after the revolution people were initiating the help, so Kherna now focuses more on volunteers and their plans.

According to Salah, Egypt has approximately 32,000 NGOs, but only 9,000 of them are active due to shortages in money, time, volunteers, and organization. Given how nearly half the nation’s population is living below the poverty line, Salah finds the numbers discouraging.

Although the idea is new, creative and could lead to a better future, the owners know success can’t come without everyone’s cooperation. One issue they face is that many NGOs strive and compete to be independent, while Kherna is trying to bring everyone together for the greater good of the country and its people.

“Kherna is not just our project. We want to [create] ‘crowd sourcing’, so that everyone can contribute,” says Salah. “We want people to feel like Kherna is theirs too, and to join us to build a better future.”

Kherna now has partnerships with organizations with similar objectives, including Bawabt El-Kher, Dalil El-Kher and Baladna.

 “I wish that people would check out Kherna when they wake up, before going to work and before they sleep just like they do with Facebook and Twitter,” says Salah. “I want it to be part of their life style. I want Kherna to be the charity and development Facebook.”