Helm’s Online Programme Bridges the Gap Between Employers and People with Special Needs

In their latest effort to get Egyptians with special needs fully immersed into the job market, Helm Academy is prepping their training programmes for the pandemic by hosting them entirely online. The local non-profit organization was recently awarded first place in MIT’s Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition for Entaleq, a mobile application that they launched.

“Our mission is to empower people with disabilities to all aspects of life, but this programme focuses on making employment accessible, not just physically but socially,’ Amena Saied, Helm CEO, told CairoScene. Bridging the gap between employers and people with special needs, the programme focuses on core skills like self-management, communication, and business etiquette that help smoothen their transition into the job market.

“Employers aren’t refusing to hire people with special needs maliciously, it’s happening because most people don’t understand their disabilities, because we don’t have enough inclusion," Saied said. As insensitive as it may sound, it is more reflective of companies' failure to catch up to the necessities of inclusion. "If a company were to hire a blind person the next day, they would be terrified that they didn’t know what to do with them. So we teach companies to become inclusive, too.”

Although Egyptian law does declare that workplaces with 50 employees or more must have a five percent inclusion rate of people with special needs, this requirement is rarely met. In part, that’s due to our infrastructure's inability to make way for people with special needs, whether that's in our education or in the way we construct our physical spaces — often times meaning that they simply do not get the same opportunities as people without special needs. This is where projects like Helm Academy come into action. With programmes like this having a 60% hiring rate after completion, Helm Academy offers promising results in a field where many of us have fallen behind.