OHK’s Ahmed Hassan presented to the 2006 Global Summit of Women in Cairo, Egypt, where he discussed shortcomings by hospitality investors and management in driving gender equity, and, in so doing, contributing to the achievement of the Third Millennium Development Goal. The keynote presentation, attended by the First Lady of Egypt and highly promoted by Egypt’s National Council for Women, brought gender issues to the forefront of Egypt’s tourism industry, which contributes nearly 50,000 jobs every year in remote and gender-unequal regions of Egypt. A roadmap was presented to build a practical and implementable strategy for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment, encouraging the tourism sector to take on mainstream gender issues in their respective tourism policies.

Mr. Hassan presented findings from a 2005 gender analysis of the living conditions of the Ababda & Bashareya tribeswomen of Southern Egypt, where one of the largest tourism investment schemes in the world is taking place. He argued that the traditional paradigm of small income-generating enterprises, though well-intentioned, will never scale sufficiently to meet national development objectives. As Mr. Hassan observed: “Tourist development has been creeping down Egypt’s so-called ‘Deep South’ for nearly a decade, but targeted legislation that could embed capacity building and employment of local communities into development projects has been absent.” Mr. Hassan continued: "The government must institutionalize local community development and gender equality as part of large investor and land sale contracts, with jobs created for local women being as important a KPI as the number of hotel rooms developed.”