Ayman Abdel-Wahab: Special mission

With business sense, he serves a passion to engage the mentally disabled

By Abeer Anwar

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Abdel-Wahab handing Queen Rania, Syria's First Lady Asmaa Al-Assad and Ibrahim Nafie, Al-Ahram 's chairman of the board and editor-in-chief the Special Olympics armour in recognition of their efforts towards intellectually disabled

His office in Mohandessin is the only place you can meet him. And the only chance you have to see his face is when he stands to shake hands with you. Otherwise his two eyes are always glued to his computer where he receives a minimum of 200 e-mails daily. Yet he still lends you a good ear. The 39- year-old businessman-turned-sports-administrator explains: "Through my computer, I can be in touch with the MENA Programmes and with the Special Olympics Head Office in Washington DC. It's the best way to follow everything and keep up-to-date with everything that's going on around you." His laptop is his faithful companion on all his trips abroad.

Ayman Abdel-Wahab, Special Olympics Middle East and North Africa (MENA) managing director, is maybe a little stout, despite his above average height. Dressed always in suit and tie of sensible colours, he is a heavy smoker, forever taken up with administering, e-mails and paper-work. Yet though he speaks in facts and figures, rather than personal opinions, his executive exterior hides a passion which has changed his life, and made him more or less abandon his professional life as a computer technologist. Now, practically all of his time is spent promoting sports for the mentally disabled, first in Egypt, and more recently, in the Arab region and the Middle East.

What was it fascinated engineer Abdel-Wahab and changed his entire life? The Special Olympics: a non-profit organisation that provides year-round sports training and athletics competitions for more than one million people with mental disabilities in more than 150 countries. It works with athletes as young as eight years old, and sets no upper age limit.

"The story goes back to July 1998, when I was chosen as a board member of Misr Language Schools to represent the parents," Abdel-Wahab begins. He speaks clearly, his eyes gazing directly at you from beneath his thick eyebrows. He first heard of the Special Olympics movement when he met with a number of intellectually handicapped students attending the school. The school's director , Magda Moussa, and her husband engineer Ismail Osman, were heavily involved in the Special Olympics movement in Egypt (SOE), in which they held the positions of chairman and president, respectively. Sensing Abdel-Wahab's desire to do more for the students, Osman and Moussa nominated him as SOE national director.

"I did not hesitate a minute," says Abdel-Wahab.

Straightway he plunged into devising a three-year development plan for the Egyptian programme, at the request of the Special Olympics Board. The aim was to make the programme more economically viable, and expand activities by attracting fundraisers and publicising the movement widely through the media. "At that time, many parents felt the stigma of having a mentally handicapped child, and they would simply shut them up, they would hide them away at home," he recalls.

That was in 1998. Since then, Abdel-Wahab has transformed SOE into a hive of constant activity, where there is always work, and, as he himself puts it, "actually very little time for play". Together with his team, Abdel-Wahab managed to raise the number of mentally-handicapped athletes in the program from 2,240 to 15,000 within only two years. "My dream was to reach every mentally handicapped person, wherever they might be in Egypt."

In 1999, the Egyptian Programme was nominated to host the MENA Games, and Abdel-Wahab was asked to take over as head of the MENA Games Organising Committee. After making the event a success -- thanks in no small part, as he points out, "to the strong support given by Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt's first lady and the honorary chairwoman of SOE" -- Abdel-Wahab went on to prepare an Egyptian delegation to participate in the Summer Games held in North Carolina the same year.

Born in 1965, Abdel-Wahab was educated at Al-Horreya School. In 1982, he joined the faculty of Engineering,telecommunications and electronics department, from where he graduated with a BSc in 1987. He was very close to his father, Ali, Abdel-Wahab, a general engineer in the armed forces, but "who used to forget his military discipline when he came home", his son remembers, grinning.

From his father he inherited a passion for "strictness, punctuality and discipline", he recalls, though he admits that he himself has never been able to strike the balance between work and leisure as his father did.

After graduation, Abdel-Wahab embarked on the first stage of his career by working with prominent businessman Mohamed Nosseir. Eight years later, he left Nosseir to form his own company for touristic investment and electromechanical engineering.

At the age of 20, he had married the woman he calls his "childhood love", Ghada Yassin. Their marriage crowned a long-standing love story which had begun when they were both at school. Today, they have four daughters: Hana and Salma, aged 13 and 10, respectively, and the six-year-old twins Menna and Malak. Though they are still young, Abdel- Wahab has already instilled in them his own passion for the Special Olympics, encouraging them to participate in the 2004 Summer Games in Ireland. Today, he harbours the ambition that they will one day join him in working for the movement.

After three years into the world of Special Olympics, and with many achievements already under his belt, in 2000 Abdel-Wahab received an unexpected call from Timothy Shriver, Special Olympics CEO and president, inviting him to travel to the States the very next day. There, Shriver explained to Abdel-Wahab that a consulting company had advised Special Olympics International to decentralise much of its work to smaller regional operations in Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific, East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Before he returned to Cairo, Abdel-Wahab thus found himself nominated as the MENA region managing director, having been selected by the Special Olympics board out of a field of more than 20 other candidates. Thus he again found himself facing a challenge, and this time it was a mammoth one: having made a success of the Special Olympics Egypt programme, he was now responsible for turning it into a model for the entire region.

Commenting on his appointment, Shriver had said, "We were looking for a number of qualities: leadership, a grasp of Special Olympics and a passion for athletes -- and those equalled Ayman Abdel-Wahab."

Yet it was not all to be smooth sailing. "I found myself in a mess," Abdel-Wahab admits. "How do you manage 20 programmes?" He gestures in the air with his hands, as he always does when emotion carries him away. And it's true: the challenge was enormous. The MENA Programmes cover countries as diverse as Iran, the Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, the Gulf States, North Africa, Libya, Yemen and Mauritania. "Each country, of course, has vastly different circumstances: some had lots of human resources, but not enough funds, while with others, it was the opposite."

But mess or no mess, Abdel-Wahab doesn't know the meaning of the word, "impossible". So he went ahead and got on with the job. Result? At the last MD's Meeting held in October 2004 in Washington DC, the MENA region was named as the best when it came to applying the five-year development plan and attracting the greatest number of athletes.

Abdel-Wahab started out on this journey by, as he puts it, "building the house from the inside out". He began by gathering around him at the Cairo head office a well-qualified team. They started small and eventually grew to cover all 12 components of a successful Special Olympics Programme. "The fleet is now ready to go out and change the world around it into a better place," Abdel-Wahab confides, in a rare moment of feeling. The emotion flares up for an instant, and then it's back to talking facts and figures again.

Taking the idea of decentralisation a stage further, different offices were opened in different countries in the region, each with responsibility for different functions. In this way, Abdel-Wahab was able to bring the different countries together to pool their efforts. Thus there is now a sports office in Lebanon, an organisational development office in Jordan, a media, fundraising and communications office in the United Arab Emirates, and a competitions office in Tunisia. The head office remains in Cairo. Soon afterwards, Abdel-Wahab was ready to start work on the outside of his house, by paying a number of site visits to the different programmes across the region. "In this way, I was able to discover the weak points and drawbacks of every programme, and their needs." He went on to set up a number of training courses in different areas, so as to form an army of well-trained people all over the region. "We wanted to root them in the Special Olympics movement, and show them how to deal with mentally disabled athletes."

He continues, "I was after making each programme an entity by itself, that could stand and work alone, using its own resources and capabilities. The only way we can reach our goal is by training a large number of cadres so that each of them can launch a Special Olympics Programme in his own country."

With 17 of its 20 programmes now virtually "standing on their own feet", the MENA region has already raised the number of its athletes from 10,000 to 50,000 over the past three years. Abdel-Wahab is understandably optimistic. "I am sure that with experienced and well-trained staff working in each programme, we will easily reach 60,000 athletes in the next phase."

However, political circumstances also play a role, holding three of the 20 MENA programmes back, as Palestine, Iraq and the Sudan continue to suffer war and chronic instability. Indeed, experience seems to have made Abdel-Wahab sceptical as to the very concept of a single region called MENA. "Politics aside, each country has its own traditions and conventions. You really cannot lump them all uniformly together."

Abdel-Wahab also admits that without high-powered support, "specifically through the help of several first ladies and honorary chairmen across the region", the movement would never have achieved the momentum it has. It is this increasing publicity which is enabling the movement to achieve its aim of helping integrate the mentally and physically challenged as full members of their societies.

Special Olympics prides itself on being a complete movement, which provides not only year-round sports competitions, but also takes into consideration the athletes' health, their place in their families, and how to include them not only in the movement, but in society at large. Abdel-Wahab enumerates the different aspects of this process in his typically organised fashion.

"First, we have the Healthy Athlete Programme, where data on the health status and needs of people with mental disabilities is collected, analysed and disseminated. This data and all the accompanying research is important for planning our programmes, gaining popular support, and improving public policies." Before and during any sports events, the programmes provide comprehensive medical care and check ups. "The aim is to improve each athlete's ability to train and compete in the Special Olympics."

The second programme is the Special Olympics Schools and Youth initiative, which is committed to increasing the participation of young people who do not suffer from mental disabilities in Special Olympics activities, by establishing school-based Special Olympics programmes and activities.

"For instance," Abdel-Wahab explains, "the SO Get Into (SOGI) programme teaches children how to deal with mentally handicapped students as part of their school curriculum, and initiates youngsters into how to engage the handicapped in their communities."

A third programme is the Athlete Leadership Programme (ALP), which allows athletes to explore opportunities for participation in roles previously considered "non-traditional". Through ALPs, athletes serve on boards of directors or local organising committees. "Athletes excel as spokespersons, team captains, coaches and officials," stresses Abdel-Wahab.

A fourth programme is Special Olympics Family Leadership and Support, which provides a number of ways in which to support and honour the athlete's family, while also contributing to raising their own awareness.

Abdel-Wahab himself just seems to go from honour to honour. Last year, he was chosen as part of a Special Olympics Executive Management Team, which is responsible for planning the future and welfare of SO athletes. He will serve a five-year term, along with Jim Schmutz, North America managing director. "This establishes our region as being on a par with our counterparts in North America," he remarks with pride.

Yet despite his obvious passion for the athletes, he admits that he deals with Special Olympics as "a commercial company, not a charitable organisation".

Although the Special Olympics movement revolves around sport, Abdel-Wahab stresses that "we have to remember that Special Olympics is a business that needs investment like any other business. It is just that our product is athletes, each of whom needs special care, training and coaches. I have studied the movement as a business, not as a social welfare programme. That is why we have been so successful."

"The human dimension is the core of the movement," he admits, "but administering our activities is something else!"

SO is a non-profit organisation, he agrees, "but you have to get the best returns, the best income, in order to spend it on the athletes, to reach out to the mentally handicapped, and to establish the facilities for the best possible training programmes, so that these individuals will be able to realise their dreams, their aspirations".

Now, a new goal has been set by Special Olympics worldwide. Under the latest five-year plan, its seven regions, including the Middle East (MENA), are to work to double the total number of its athletes to two million. For the MENA, this translates into the target of 110,000 individuals in 2005.

"Over the last 35 years, Special Olympics has served one million mentally handicapped athletes," says Abdel-Wahab. "That means there are still some 170 million others we have to reach out to. So we still have a long way to go!"