Helm is building a more inclusive Egypt and changing the system from within

🏆 When Helm’s football squad jetted to Houston, Texas, for the Genuine Cup, they didn’t expect to walk home with the tournament’s most-coveted award, especially after they lost their opening match against the US. But that didn’t deter them; it pushed them to begin the real comeback shortly after.

“The Genuine Cup project was almost a miracle.” Amena ElSaie, Helm’s co-founder, tells EnterpriseAM. With only three months to assemble its first-ever delegation for the Genuine Cup — a global football tournament for athletes with intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities — Helm built a 12-player team of athletes from scratch. Then, just days before the tournament, the team’s head coach was still waiting on his visa — and the squad arrived in the US without its primary goalkeeper. Helm had to recruit an autistic goalkeeper locally and build team chemistry on the fly, ElSaie tells us. The team played Costa Rica, then Iceland, and started a run that ended with a 2-1 victory over Andorra in the final, scoring them their first-ever Genuine Cup. The delegation also took home the Best Energy Award.

For Helm, the tournament was about more than a trophy. Some of the players had never traveled abroad or left their families before. They visited Nasa, met athletes from 53 countries, and returned home with a new sense of confidence and independence. That victory captures the bigger question at the heart of Helm’s work…

…What would inclusion look like if it were built into the systems people move through every day, rather than treated as a separate social cause?

A peek behind the scenes

Long before the answer to that question existed, Helm’s story began with ElSaie (LinkedIn), who had originally imagined a very different career. She studied journalism and mass communication alongside fine arts at AUC, and had wanted to be an artist. A formative experience came while studying abroad in Germany, when she visited Dialog in the Dark, an exhibition that lets visitors experience everyday life without sight. Moving through the world with a cane and navigating streets in complete darkness made her confront how little she understood about the experience of people with visual disabilities.

After university, conversations with her friend and future co-founder Ramez Maher (LinkedIn) began to connect her experience with disability accessibility to his experience of watching a blind classmate at AUC struggle with classroom barriers and being excluded when classmates gave presentations without audio narration. For both founders to-be, the lesson was bigger than one inaccessible presentation. Disability, they concluded, was often created by the environments people designed around themselves: stairs instead of ramps, presentations without narration.

The idea took shape in 2011, during one of Egypt’s most turbulent periods. Helm then began as a student club at AUC in 2012, became an NGO in 2014, and established its commercial consulting firm in 2016.

From failure to flourishing

When Helm began, the advice from established disability organizations was this: rehabilitation and early intervention existed, but employment was missing. So Helm focused on job placement. Its team recruited 600 people with disabilities and approached cafés, restaurants, and factories to match candidates with jobs. Six months later, not one person remained in their position. It was a devastating failure, but it changed the way Helm understood inclusion. “Every door we opened revealed 10 more layers to the problem,” ElSaie says.

Employment could not be separated from what happened at home, in schools, on public transportation, or inside the workplace itself. Different disabilities also came with very different needs, including non-visible disabilities such as autism, Down syndrome, and ADHD. That became the basis of Helm 360 — a model built around the idea that a 360-degree problem requires a 360-degree solution (pdf). Rather than focusing on one stage of a person’s life, Helm maps inclusion across early childhood and intervention, education, employment and career development, then independent living, infrastructure, and culture.

Selling accessibility, not sympathy

Today, Helm works on both sides of the inclusion equation. For companies and institutions, that means consulting, recruitment, accessibility audits, corporate training and certifications. For people with disabilities (PWDs), it means training, career development and pathways into employment. Helm’s model doesn’t charge PWDs for its services; instead, businesses and institutions pay for the expertise they need to make their workplaces and services more inclusive.

Helm’s accessibility work has included ramps, tactile blocks, Braille documents and signage, as well as sign-language interpretation. Its university work combines physical audits and infrastructure changes with staff training to address both physical and social barriers. That approach has also taken Helm into public infrastructure and tourism. In Giza, it developed an accessible model of sidewalks and crossings around Cairo University, using ramps, curb cuts, and tactile blocks to help blind and visually impaired students navigate independently.

ElSaei argues that lasting inclusion cannot depend entirely on charity. Instead, businesses and governments need to understand inclusion as economically valuable, particularly given the size of the disability market and workforce. Helm’s flagship Seed program focuses on foundational workplace skills, covering professional communication, presentation skills, problem-solving, time management, business etiquette, CV writing, and emotional intelligence. The program has awarded more than 3k scholarships, graduates around 500 PWDs each year, and reports that 80% of graduates secure jobs within a year.

For those ready to go further, their Grow program provides advanced career development and specialized training, followed by the Stars program, which takes a smaller group of high-performing candidates into continuing education programs at the American University in Cairo, with corporate partners supporting their professional development. Helm also brings inclusion into the workplace through its Unity Cup, where teams from 30 corporations compete in goalball and pan-disability football following four weeks of practice.

The dream in numbers

The numbers behind Helm’s model are substantial:

• More than 1k partnerships and a network of over 500 key partners;
• More than 15k people trained, including employers and PWDs;
• More than 1.5k accessibility audits;
• Over 1.5k PWDs directly empowered through training and employment pathways;
• Over 250 mn people reached through marketing campaigns;
• About 1.3 bn people reached through PR campaigns;
• Work spanning 27 Egyptian governorates and five regional markets.

The footprint extends into higher education too: Helm began developing disability service centers across five public universities between 2018 and 2021, then expanded accessibility assessments and interventions across 27 public universities between 2022 and 2023. It has since helped replicate the model at 15 additional public universities. Helm’s work has also earned multiple Zero Project awards for employment, accessibility, and education, alongside recognition through Africa’s Business Heroes and the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Ninja Business Plan competition.

Taking inclusion outside of the workplace

Helm has also worked with local partners in Dahab to develop adaptive scuba diving and rock climbing initiatives, install ramps along the Mamsha promenade, adapt hotels, train local communities, and certify adaptive diving instructors. Tourism has similarly become part of the inclusion equation. The organization has worked to improve accessibility at tourist sites in Luxor and on major landmarks including the Grand Egyptian Museum and Karnak Temple, while its portfolio records accessibility work across more than 1.5k major tourist attractions in Egypt.

Now, following the Genuine Cup victory, Helm is scaling again. A national agreement with the Qaderoon B’ekhtelaf Fund will support the expansion of the Khatwa Career Fair from 2.5k participants toward 100k job seekers with disabilities over five years, while Seed is set to expand across all 27 governorates.

Its 2026 roadmap also includes expanding Seed and Grow, enhancing university disability service centers, establishing vocational disability service centers, and launching a blue-collar edition of Khatwa. With its accessibility work already reaching Giza and some of Egypt’s most important cultural and tourism sites, one of the country’s most recognizable backdrops may soon become part of the conversation too. The Pyramids are, quite literally, the next big landmark to watch.