Nine years of admission tracking, five editors in Sohag, twelve museums on the rota.

How it started.

Heba el-Kafrawi joined the Cairo Egyptian Museum's visitor-services team in 2008 as a junior ticketing officer. By 2014 she was the senior visitor-services officer responsible for the ticket-office operations at the main Tahrir building and for liaison with the Supreme Council of Antiquities on the museum's admission framework. She left the Council in early 2017 to set up the Index, motivated by the recurring problem she had seen from the ticket-window side: visitors arriving with out-of-date guidebook information, foreign students unsure which student-card categories the museum accepted, families uncertain about the under-12 cutoff, and wheelchair-using visitors unable to confirm in advance whether the museum's lift was functioning. The official channels addressed each of these inconsistently, and Heba's view was that an independent quarterly tracker would be the single most useful documentary contribution to Egyptian museum visiting.

The first quarterly tables went out in April 2017, covering five museums. Issue One was photocopied at the Sohag print shop downstairs from the cooperative's first rented office and posted to forty-seven subscribers — mostly Heba's professional contacts from the Council and a small number of Sohag-based academics who had heard of the project. By the end of the first year the rota had grown to nine museums and the subscriber base to two hundred and forty. The cooperative was incorporated as Sohag Visitor Equity Press S.A.E. in November 2017.

The five editors.

Heba el-Kafrawi — founder and lead editor. Born Sohag 1980. Seven years at the Cairo Egyptian Museum's visitor-services team through 2017. Specialist subjects: admission frameworks, ticket-window operational realities, visitor-experience policy. Signs the quarterly tables personally. Reads Arabic, English and conversational French.

Mohamed Abdel-Aziz — Upper Egypt editor. Born Asyut 1985. Trained as a museum-studies graduate at the University of Asyut (2003–07) and worked at the Sohag Museum's curatorial team from 2010 to 2018. Joined the Index in 2018. Covers Luxor Museum, Mummification Museum, Sohag Museum, Mallawi Museum and the Imhotep Museum at Saqqara. Speaks Arabic, English and basic Coptic.

Nadine Habashy — accessibility editor. Born Alexandria 1989. Trained in occupational therapy at the University of Alexandria (2007–12), then five years at the Alexandria Hospital's rehabilitation unit before joining the Index in 2019. Runs the annual accessibility audit and maintains the working relationship with the Egyptian Disability Rights Association and the Cairo Accessible Tourism Centre. Her audit checklist is the cooperative's most-cited single document.

Khaled el-Saggar — finance and student-card editor. Born Mansoura 1991. Trained as an accountant at the Cairo Tax Institute (2009–13), then four years at the Egyptian Tax Authority before joining the Index in 2020. Maintains the cooperative's financial transparency note and runs the student-card-acceptance survey across the twelve museums.

Aisha Mansy — research and corrections editor. Born Cairo 1993. Read tourism management at Helwan University (2011–15) and then three years at the Ministry of Tourism's visitor-data unit before joining the Index in 2022. Runs the corrections process, the reader-mail section and the Index's institutional-context essays.

The administrator, Salma Refaat, has handled subscriptions, accounting, the public correspondence inbox and the office Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday opening hours since 2018. Salma does not write for the Index.

Cooperative governance.

The cooperative is governed by the five editors as an editorial board, with the administrator attending without voting rights. Major editorial decisions — addition of a museum to the rota, change to the accessibility-audit checklist, change to the methodology document — require a four-of-five board vote. The chair role rotates between Heba, Mohamed and Nadine on a three-year cycle; Heba holds the current term through December 2027.

Funding and editorial independence.

Reader subscriptions covered approximately fifty-seven percent of revenue in 2025. The El-Minia Cultural Foundation research grant — paid annually since 2018 under a renewable five-year agreement — contributed thirty-one percent. The remaining twelve percent came from occasional consultancy contracts the editors hold privately with non-museum clients (typically tourism-policy consultancy for governorate tourism offices), all declared in the December transparency note. No museum, ticket reseller, tour operator, advocacy organisation or government department has funded the Index at any point in its nine-year history. Six sponsorship approaches have been declined since 2018, all from ticket-resale platforms wanting an association with the Index's editorial brand.

The El-Minia Cultural Foundation is an Egyptian private foundation established in 2002 to support cultural-policy documentation in Upper Egypt; its grants are made on a documentary-output basis and carry no editorial conditions. The foundation's annual report describes the Index grant as part of its broader visitor-access programme.

The documentary stance.

The Index's editorial choice is to document what the museums actually charge and how they actually open and accommodate visitors. We do not advocate for higher or lower fees, do not advocate for any specific accessibility policy, and do not lobby the Supreme Council of Antiquities on visitor-policy questions. Where the Index becomes aware of practices that may be at odds with the Council's published framework or with Egyptian disability law, we document the observation and let the relevant regulator or advocate take the matter forward; we do not act as the regulator or the advocate ourselves.

What we publish — and what we do not.

We publish the quarterly admission tables, the opening-hours calendars, the annual accessibility audit, the Ramadan-period schedules, the student-card-acceptance survey, the monthly bulletin, the corrections log, the methodology document, and the financial transparency note. We publish the names of museums whose accessibility audits score below the cooperative's threshold; we do not publish the names of individual museum staff at the ticket window who may have given inconsistent information; we do not publish photographs of identifiable visitors at any museum.

The Sohag office.

The office is the second floor of a 1970s commercial building on Sharia Gamal Abdel Nasser, three blocks south of the Sohag corniche in the El-Karnak district. The building's other tenants are a small dental clinic, a textile-import firm and a private school's administrative office. The Index office has three rooms: a reception room, a working room with the cooperative's research table and the corrections-log binder, and a small library with the printed bulletin archive since 2017 and a reference shelf of Egyptian museum-policy publications. Office hours Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday from 10:00 to 14:00 Cairo time.

Visiting researchers.

The office hosts approximately eighteen visiting researchers per year — primarily museum-studies students from Cairo, Asyut and Helwan universities working on visitor-experience thesis topics, accessibility-policy researchers from advocacy organisations, and travel journalists writing on Egyptian museum admission. Visitors are welcome by appointment; the library is open for use during visits, and the cooperative is happy to schedule short consultations with the relevant editor for specific research questions.

Visiting researchers and the corrections-log archive.

The Sohag office hosts approximately eighteen visiting researchers per year — primarily museum-studies students from Cairo, Asyut and Helwan universities working on visitor-experience thesis topics, accessibility-policy researchers from advocacy organisations including the EDRA and the Cairo Accessible Tourism Centre, travel journalists writing on Egyptian museum admission for English-language and Arabic-language publications, and occasional Supreme Council of Antiquities staff members coming through Sohag for the Council's own purposes who use the visit to consult our published archive. The library is open for use during visits; the corrections-log archive (the cooperative's longest-running working document, with one hundred and twenty-eight entries since 2017) is the most-consulted single record in our archive room. Visitors are welcome to consult the archive during office hours and are asked to log their visit in the office's visitor book so that future researchers with overlapping interests can be connected through Salma's introduction.

Correspondence.

Write to [email protected] for any matter. Telephone Salma on +20 93 6175 408 during office hours. Postal correspondence to the Sharia Gamal Abdel Nasser address. The Index reads every message and replies; the response time is two working days for routine matters and longer for substantive accessibility or fee-correction questions which involve the relevant editor's verification.