Between the 1970s and 1990s much of the Discourse around development in Egypt revolved around framing the country as a victim of demographic misfortune, requiring the intervention of economic and technical experts. During this period much of the focus of development work undertaken in the country has been in the southern region known as the Sa’id or Upper Egypt (Zaalouk, 2004, Unicef, 2007). This mainly agricultural area is by most accounts home to some of the poorest governorates of the 27 that make up the republic, making it one of the poorest regions in the country. Beyond its human development profile, Upper Egypt has occupied a very unique place in Egyptian nationalist narrative since the end of the colonial period. Egypt’s Cairo-centric national development priorities have historically produced initiatives aimed at eradicating behaviors deemed ‘backwards’ or ‘pre-modern’ at the provincial levels. This paper argues that despite a strong central government in Egypt with virtually no decentralized bureaucracy, the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s have created the conditions for NGOs (international and Egyptian) to replace the national government as loco-parentis, particularly with regard to the delivery of services associated with social and economic development. Drawing on interview data, textual analysis, and six months of ethnographic fieldwork gathered while embedded with a leading Cairo-based American NGO, this paper reveals the ways in which a new rural-urban dualism at the provincial level has emerged during this most recent period. This poststructural analysis argues that along with the aforementioned historical developments, prevailing development logics of “empowerment” (particularly those concerning women), embody what Foucault (1969) as citied in Mills (1997) calls discursive formations. This framework uncovers the systematizing effects Discourse has on the ways people think and behave within a particular social, cultural, and historical context (Mills, 1997). In the context of this study, this framing reveals the ways in which NGOs have become not only responsible for delivering “development” services previously the charge of the national government, but more importantly an integral part of Cairo’s cultural war on rural Upper Egypt as a whole. These developments suggest that culture remains the primary unit of analysis, and affecting it through intervention continues to be a preoccupation of the development community.