Founding cohort now forming
The region’s first professional body for student governments and student leaders.
The network that connects them, and the standard that raises them.
universities across the Middle East and North Africa
students inside them
Why Pact exists
Nothing connects
student life
in this region.
A thousand campuses, each working alone. Pact is the connective tissue that was never built here, running on three levels at once.
to student government
Counterparts across the region who share what works, plan joint projects, and back each other through the year.
to student
A regional stage for student talent. Competitions, festivals, and founders meeting the operators and investors who can back their ideas.
to institution
Academic partnerships across borders, regional recognition, and stronger outcomes for students, built with universities that share the same goal.
The network
Sixteen countries,
one record.
How the network runs
Connected at every layer.
Benchmark how your student government runs against others in your country at the National Conference, then against the wider region at the Summit.
The network keeps working between events, not just while a conference is on.
Tell Pact what you are working on. It finds the student government that has already done it and introduces you, with a pointer to what worked for them.
Pact introduces the people who should meet, and shares what is working across the region, so practice that meets the Standard reaches every campus.
A region where student life compounds instead of resetting.
Why the student government
40
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clubs and societies on a typical campus, each one excellent at what it does and serving the students who find it.
student government, standing behind all of them. Strengthen it, and everything it supports gets stronger.
Where to go next
About
Raising the practice.
Developing the people.
Widening the reach.
The aims, the story and the people behind Pact.
What Pact is
A professional body for student governments.
Its members are student governments. Its reach is every student they serve.
Pact publishes the region’s standard for how student governments should run, and measures its members against it.
Pact links student governments and student leaders across the region, through a year-round network and its events.
Pact works directly with student governments, from ongoing advice through membership to hands-on consulting.
Why it was founded
Opportunities on every campus. Nothing connecting them.
Each year, a new team inherits the problems, not the answers.
Student governments across the region work in isolation, with no way to learn from one another.
Students’ projects, ideas and talents stay inside one campus, with no stage or support beyond it.
Each team takes office, solves the same problems, and hands over. What it learned leaves with it.
A shared standard, a regional network and practical support, so student life builds on itself instead of starting over.
The founders
Both of them
were student
leaders first.
Ahmed Abuarab
Co-founder
Served in the student government of the American University in Cairo from his first year, working on governance, the academic and financial issues students face, and elections. He won the university’s Student Government Cup, and still mentors the leaders who came after him.
LinkedIn
Taha Ouda
Co-founder
Served in the student government of the American University in Cairo, where he convened the region’s first student government summit. He has since worked with student leaders at fifteen institutions across the region, building the relationships Pact now runs on.
LinkedInContact
Pact contacts institutions directly. You are welcome to go first.
[email protected]Write to us, or send a message and it reaches the right person.
Pact MENA
The Student Governments Best Practices Standard.
What good student governance looks like in this region, written as practices a team can act on.
What it promotes
What changes when a team runs by it.
Written rules on who decides what, a clear role for every officer, and elections whose results everyone respects.
Initiatives planned around what students actually need and judged by how many they reach, so budgets go to what lasts.
Budgets managed with discipline and decisions recorded and shared, so students can see what their student government does with their money.
A student government with a defined role in how its institution is run, and clear lines with the people it works with, so its standing carries from one team to the next.
What sets the best apart is practice, not resources.
- Corporate governance
- Nonprofit governance
- University governance
- Student governance
The architecture
Four families of practice. Twelve dimensions.
Each family addresses a distinct question about the health of a student government. Select any dimension to see how the Standard is written.
One of seventy-two practices, reproduced as it appears in the document.
Distribution
The Standard is issued to member institutions.
First edition, 2026. Thirty-nine pages, four families, twelve dimensions, seventy-two practices. It is what Pact’s self-assessment, benchmarking and consulting all run on. Held by the student government rather than by an officer, and reissued with each new edition.
MembershipMembership
Everything your team needs to run a better year.
Know where you stand, get support to close the gaps, and prove the progress to your university.
What membership is
One year, three steps.
See where you stand. A self-assessment that scores how you run, shows the gaps, and compares you with peers.
Close the gaps. A plan built around what the assessment found, with regular check-ins across the year to keep it moving.
Show the progress. An Annual Impact Report on what changed, and where you now sit against the region.
Membership benefits
What you access.
Your year in Pact
The membership is a year, not a login.
Twelve months, starting the day you join.
For the university, and every student in it.
Membership shows the university takes student leadership seriously, at a regional and global level.
Students build the leadership experience and regional network that careers are made of, and student founders find a stage to grow their ideas.
A regional network that recognises and supports student talent, from film and music to design, debate and research.
Ties with universities across the region, through shared forums, research and initiatives.
Founding membership
Be one of the first seven.
Seven founding placesAcross the region, for the first institutions to join.
- Your rate, held$799 a year for your first two years.
- Named permanentlyRecognised as a founding institution for as long as Pact exists.
- Everyone includedThe student government is the member. Every officer and advisor gets full access, and the benefits reach the wider student body.
Founding rate
$799
A year, for the whole student government. $999 for institutions joining later.
Apply for founding membershipEvents
The region, in one room.
Two flagship conferences for student governments.
Regional events for every student.
Pact’s flagship event
The Regional
Summit.
Three days on a member campus. Two days of conference and one Youth Forum day, with the whole region in one room.
You leave with
A year’s targets set with the whole region, initiatives signed with student governments across borders, masterclasses from the Pact Experts Network, and a team that returns knowing how the region’s best serve their students.
The programme
- The region sets the year’s targets together
- Cross-border initiatives agreed and signed in the room
- The Presidents’ Masterclass, while teams build their year’s plan
- Panels with the leaders shaping student life
- The Annual Awards, for the region’s best
- The Youth Forum, open to every student
The Pact
Experts Network
Every track at the National Conference and every masterclass at the Regional Summit is led by the Pact Experts Network: industry professionals and the region’s former student leaders.
- Elections
- Governance
- Finance
- Academic affairs
- Events & programming
- Marketing & communications
- Leadership & teams
Attending
Open to every institution. Even more for members.
Regular attendees
- The general programme and its speakers
- The same room as every other student government
Member attendees
- A reduced rate on every event
- A head start, with your team’s priorities already known
- Exclusive masterclasses and workshops, built around your team’s needs
Coming soon
Be in the room for the first National Conference.
The first time a country’s student governments meet in one room, starting in Egypt and the UAE. Register your interest to be the first to hear the date, the host and how to bring your team.
Register interestConsulting
When the problem needs building, not answering.
Hands-on work, from a rebuilt constitution to a resolved crisis.
Where Pact works
Eleven domains,
each tied to
the Standard.
Filter by the Standard’s four families of practice.
Every problem is different. So is every engagement.
How an engagement runs
The same seven steps, every time.
Understanding the problem together.
The approach, timeline and fee.
Scope and terms, signed.
Roles, rhythm and plan set.
Built with your team.
Yours to run, without Pact.
A return to check it held.
Who does the work
The people who scoped it are the people who deliver it.
Pact’s founders lead every engagement, start to finish.
Both have run student governments through elections, budgets, handovers, services and initiatives.
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The Pact
Experts Network
Practising specialists, brought onto every engagement that needs them.
You get an expert on the exact problem in front of you.
- Elections
- Governance
- Finance
- Academic affairs
- Events & programming
- Marketing & communications
- Leadership & teams
Starting
Every engagement begins with a conversation.
Tell us what you’re facing. If it’s work Pact should take on, a proposal follows. Everything discussed stays confidential.
Request a discovery callResearch
The only record of how student government actually works here.
Not a survey and not an estimate. A standing record, built institution by institution, of who governs students here, how they are chosen, what they control, and what they do not.
countries in the record
institutions profiled
Fourteen fields on each, and a five-tier grade of how active the student government actually is.
The record
What Pact holds on every institution it maps.
Each institution is entered on the same fourteen fields, verified against primary sources rather than assembled from directories. Where a field cannot be established, it is recorded as unknown rather than estimated.
The activity scale
Every institution graded on the same five tiers.
A student government can exist on paper and not exist in practice. The scale separates the two, and it is the instrument that makes comparison across countries possible at all.
Regional findings
What the record shows.
Six questions the regional record can answer that nothing else in this region can.
What runs on it
The record is not a by-product. Everything else is built on it.
Written against what the map showed, rather than imported from another region and adjusted.
A member’s self-assessment is read against comparable institutions, not against a generic benchmark.
The national and regional reveals at Pact’s events are read off the record.
Market sequence follows what the map shows about where student governments can actually act.
Access and practice
Findings are public. Records are not.
| Public | Aggregate regional findings, the method, and the activity scale. |
| Members | Institution-level records — governance structures, electoral cycles, funding models and documents — through the Pact database. |
| Member content | Pact holds no standing access to a member’s own documents or records. A member’s material is theirs, and Pact does not read it as a matter of course. |
| Confidentiality | Nothing gathered inside a membership or an engagement is published in a form that identifies the institution. |
| Corrections | Any institution may ask to see and correct what the record holds about it, member or not. Ask about your institution. |
Founding membership
Apply for founding membership.
Be among the first permanent founding cohort.
Seven founding placesAcross the region.
- Pact writes back within two working days, to the address you give here.
- A first conversation with the people who run your student government.
- A preliminary plan, showing what membership covers for you specifically. Where the institution has to approve it, Pact will join that meeting with you.
- The membership year begins, once the plan is agreed.
This form commits your institution to nothing.
National Conference
Register your interest.
The first National Conferences are coming soon, starting in Egypt and the UAE. Register here and you will hear the date, the host and how to bring your team before they are public.
Full student government teams and their advisors.
- Seven role-based tracks, led by the Pact Experts Network
- Peer exchange with counterparts from across the country
- The National Benchmark Reveal, delivered to every student government in a sealed letter
- The Advisor Forum, a full-day programme for student life leadership
Registration opens once the host institution is confirmed. Everyone who registers interest hears first, and members attend at a reduced rate.
Consulting
Request a discovery call.
Forty-five to sixty minutes, with no commitment afterwards.
The most useful thing you can put below is what is actually happening. What broke, who is affected, what has already been tried. Pact will work out the shape of the engagement from there.
Some problems are answered in a sentence rather than an engagement. Member institutions get those answers through advisory access at no charge, and you will be told which yours is on the call.
Contact
Talk to Pact.
Tell us what you need, and it reaches the right person.
Within two working days, to the address you give here.
Legal
Privacy notice.
Pact collects what you type into a form on this site, uses it to reply to you and to run a membership or an engagement, and shares it with nobody. There is no advertising, no tracking across other sites, and nothing is sold.
Who is responsible
Pact MENA is the controller of the personal data described here. Enquiries about this notice, or about data held about you, go to [email protected] and are answered within thirty days.
What is collected
Only what you enter into a form on this site. Depending on the form, that is your name, your role, your institution and country, your institutional email address, and anything you write in a free-text field. Nothing is collected about you unless you submit it.
Standard server logs record the request itself, including an IP address, for security and to keep the site running.
Why it is used
- To reply to the enquiry you sent, and to arrange a conversation or a call.
- To administer a membership or an engagement you go on to hold, including the records that make it work.
- To invite you to Pact events where you asked to hear about them.
Nothing is used for automated decision-making, and no profile is built about you beyond the record your institution holds inside its own membership.
Who it is shared with
Nobody, other than the service providers Pact uses to run the site, send email and store records, who act on Pact's instructions and may not use the data for anything of their own. Personal data is not sold, rented or given to advertisers.
Some of those providers operate outside the country you are in. Where data moves across a border it is done under the safeguards those transfers require.
How long it is kept
Enquiries that go nowhere are deleted within twenty-four months. Records connected to a membership or an engagement are kept for as long as the relationship runs and for the period afterwards that accounting and legal obligations require.
Cookies
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Changes
If this notice changes materially, the date below changes with it and anyone holding a current membership is told directly.
Last updated 30 September 2026. © 2026 Pact MENA LLC.