Every year Egyptians start wheezing and complaining about the black clouds hanging over Cairo, which get reinforced by farmers burning the leftovers of their rice fields in the form of rice straw. But there seems to be another voice on the horizon that shouts “don't burn the rice straw — recycle it!” The voice comes in the shape of a window bringing in vivid colours, sophisticated patterns, and eco-friendly products with a developmental twist. This is what Al-Nafeza (the window) is all about. Just as a caterpillar can turn into a butterfly, rice straw, Nile water lilies and banana stalks can turn into pieces of art and stationary at the workshops of the Egyptian organisation. Al-Nafeza started in Alexandria but is now located in Darb 17/18 in the Fustat District of Cairo after moving to the capital in 2001. The name was carefully selected by its founder, Mohamed Aboul-Naga, who started the project in the 1990s as he believed that every house needed a window that promoted the sentiment of exchange. The idea of the project is to be environmentally friendly while hiring young women — either from the deaf and mute community or lower income backgrounds — and training them in how to recycle agricultural waste into hip paper products and stationary. Notebooks, gift boxes, photo frames, lamp shades and even conference folders are all decorated with ornaments, arabesque patterns, and calligraphy in various colours. In short, Al-Nafeza encompasses development through art. The headquarters of the organisation is not just a showroom of its products, but it is a place where the young women can be seen working, recycling the rice straw or dyeing and printing designs on paper. The straw must first be washed in order to get rid of its yellow colour before it is treated to become a soft mush. It can then be placed in a grinder that turns it into paste, which is later spread onto net screens and stuck onto the wall to dry. Al-Nafeza was nominated for the BBC World Challenge, a global competition that aims at finding projects or small businesses from around the world that have shown enterprise and innovation at a grassroots level. “Being here and working makes me more sociable than I used to be,” says Fatma Fahmi, 30, who has been working for Al-Nafeza for almost a third of her life. “A friend of mine told me about the place and I must say it changed my life entirely. After sitting at home not seeing anyone and not undertaking anything, I now see people and communicate. It was a big step for me,” she adds. Amira Hassan, also working at Al-Nafeza, is a 23-year-old accounting graduate from Cairo University. “My sister is deaf and mute and started working here before I did. I started helping out while I was still at university, and once I graduated I became the accountant of the organisation,” she said. She has been working alongside Fatma for four years now and even after getting her degree she decided to continue working for Al-Nafeza. Despite her being the official accountant, Hassan still puts her heart into the project, helping with recycling, dyeing and developing the products. As optimistic as the project seems, this NGO has been going through rough times. “We used to export our products to Germany,” says Inas Khamis, the wife and project partner of Abou al-Naga. “But for the past three years the market has been very bad, and I cannot afford to look for new people to hire.” Ever since the Revolution in 2011, tourists have been reluctant to spend their holidays in Egypt. Tourist visits even dropped by 32 per cent from March 2013 to March 2014, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS). Efforts to empower young women and give them a steady salary to fall back on have become harder as a result, since Al-Nafeza mainly relied on foreigners to buy the products. “When we started, we had a fund which took away worries of how to pay bills like rent and electricity,” Khamis explains. However, for the past five years the organisation has not been able to build up a similar fund. “It is for this reason that we had to focus on product development, which helped us launch new product lines,” she adds. Unfortunately, this has not been enough. Al-Nafeza was once able to employ 35 young women, but this number has now shrunk to 10. Today, the women at Al-Nafeza do not only work on their own products, but the organisation also takes special orders, like custom-designed conference folders, wedding invitations, business cards and pretty much anything else that comes to mind. While the papermaking industry in Egypt is at a definite low, Al-Nafeza is helping to revive it in a manner that also helps empower young women. The writer is a freelance journalist.
