On the banks of the Nile, the Rosetta branch, I lived an enjoyable childhood in the City of Disuq, which is the home of the famous mosque, Sidi Ibrahim.

When I was a boy in Desuq, Egypt, a city on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, about 50 miles east of Alexandria, my family lived steps away from the local landmark, a mosque named for a 13th-century Sufi sheik.

In the 1960s, I personally lived the resounding impact of President Nasser's vision of constructing Aswan's High Dam as a 'national project' for controlling the Nile irrigation and the production of electricity.

The mosque was the neighbourhood house of worship, but it was also the place where my high school friends and I came to study.

Besides being a prime cause of poor economic growth, poor governance breeds corruption, which cripples investment, wastes resources, and diminishes confidence.

Higher education should be based on quality, not quantity; receive merit-based funding; and be free of unnecessary bureaucracy. Not the least of the benefits of educational reform is to foster the pride of achievement at national and international levels.