Egyptian firm is clean, green, and in the black

So how do you make money, and treat your workers to benefits - especially in a country where most companies do neither? It's complicated, says Abouleish, but not impossible. Sekem workers contribute a small portion of their salaries to help maintain the schools, the health clinic, and other cultural benefits.

Approximately 40 percent of Sekem's money comes from its own activities, including sales and contributions from workers. A further 30-35 percent comes from grants, with an additional 15-20 percent coming from aid, mostly from the EU and US.

Some nonprofit projects inside Sekem, like the EBDA, have already become almost self-sustained. A training project for seamstresses is heading in that direction too. In a world where aid projects are increasingly criticized for bleeding money and failing to make a difference, development experts and funding agencies are roundly gushing in their praise for Sekem.

"To me this is one of the most exciting projects coming out of the Muslim world," says Asad Azfar, portfolio manager at Acumen Fund, a New York non-profit financier that helps support Abouleish's social programs.

In fact, the most common complaint about Sekem is that there aren't more projects like it. There are precious few missions like Sekem, they say, which operate from the developing world and take a holistic approach to community building, and which place importance on learning, the arts, even playtime.

The Sekem compound boasts a soccer field for its employees and an open air theater, among other recreational centers.

"We have to build a healthy, knowledge-based society," insists Abouleish. "Developing a cultural sense must be one of the highest priorities in development."

It's that attitude that has won the Egyptian doctor newfound attention in recent years. Last August, the Schwab Foundation, in association with the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, named Abouleish one of the world's 25 outstanding social entrepreneurs. And the jury of the Right Livelihood Foundation awarded Sekem its "Alternative Nobel Prize."

"It's the first time we have chosen an entrepreneur for the prize," says Right Livelihood founder Jacob von Uexkull, a writer and former EU parliamentarian. "Dr. Abouleish practices what he calls the economics of love - and it works. He proves that you can do the right thing and make a living out of it."

And living well, workers back home at the Belbeis farm say, is the best revenge.

On the compound that's more commune than corporation, trees waft gently in the afternoon breeze. A tractor rumbles down a green field. Children at the primary school are putting on the weekly singing show for their classmates and a beaming Abouleish.

The whitewashed factories and school, trimmed with bright-hued paint, are humming with activity. It's an island of tranquility outside the chaotic, smog-choked streets of nearby Cairo, a stark contrast to the gripping poverty and desperation seen across this nation of 70 million.

"We are eating healthy and our children are learning," says Mohammed Tahoor, a computer science teacher at the Sekem Group whose 2-year-old daughter hopes to start soon in the kindergarten. "What more do we need?"

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