Though still in her early twenties, the hardships of living in an impoverished informal area with little or no access to water or other services has left their mark on Samah's pale face and thin body. Samah left primary school to work as a maid. Working in homes where she could at least enjoy putting her hands in water and having a nourishing meal seemed like heaven. “At least I could have a better life there,” she said. Her words bespeak the hardship of living in the informal area of Ezbet Al-Hagganna on the outskirts of Nasr City, where there is little security and crime is rife. Samah lives with her family in a small flat in a shabby building with no private bathroom. She shares a small child's bedroom with her three sisters and a brother. “I was hardly allowed to play in a park when I was little, simply because we didn't have one in our area, and I have only ever seen the sea on TV,” Samah said. “We rarely have water at home, and I have to spend my only day off work filling and carrying water buckets from a nearby area.” Has life become any better after two revolutions? “What are you talking about?” Samah asked incredulously. “Life has become worse due to the price hikes, unemployment, and the absence of security. We do not trust the government's promises or that anyone will ever care for the poor.” Samah is, however, luckier than many other residents of such areas. In an earlier report on informal areas in Cairo and Giza, I was told heartbreaking stories of the inhumane conditions people are forced to live in. Some families shared a mattress on the floor of a tin kiosk with a cardboard ceiling that gave them little protection from the winter rains. Many reported the prevalence of crime, disease and dangerous insects and snakes. Sewage had leaked into the Saft Al-Laban, a waterway in the Giza governorate, and some schools were located close to sewage ponds. Despite such hardships, however, almost everyone who talked to Al-AhramWeekly still insisted they would not move away from the places where they live. They hoped to be either relocated to safe buildings in the same neighbourhood or provided with services that would make their living conditions more tolerable.
ALARMING FIGURES: In his book Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control,the American author David Sims, an economist and urban planner, paints a bleak picture. “Egypt seems by far to have the most extensive informal urban development of any Arab country,” said Sims, adding that such developments are “increasing at a very rapid rate.” There is no accurate figure for the number of informal areas and their inhabitants in Egypt. The 2006 census put the number of informal area inhabitants at 16 million people, but experts insist this figure is a gross underestimate. The Ministry of Housing estimates that 40 per cent of the population of Cairo lives in informal settlements, while the Informal Settlements Development Fund (ISDF), now part of the new Ministry for Urban Development, estimates that 75 per cent of urban areas throughout Egypt are unplanned and one per cent are unsafe. In his study, Sims refers to this lack of accurate figures. “The latest figures include 1,171 areas with 15 million people in 2007 by the [Egyptian] Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC), 16-21 million people in 2008 by the World Bank, and 1,210 areas in 2006, up from 1,174 areas in 2004, by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Ministry of Economic Development,” he wrote. Sims estimated that 78 per cent of population growth between 1996 and 2006 was absorbed by informal areas. Surprisingly, only seven per cent of the same growth was absorbed in formally planned areas of Cairo, while “the government's much-hyped new towns in the deserts around Greater Cairo accounted for 15 per cent,” Sims added. By 2011, Sims said, it was estimated that of Greater Cairo's 18 million inhabitants, some 12 million, or almost 67 per cent, lived in informal areas. More alarmingly, perhaps, is the fact that many would also agree with Sims' claims that informal areas “exploded” after the 25 January Revolution, “since any government control has virtually disappeared.” “Anecdotal information points to a two- to threefold increase in informal construction as compared to pre-2011 rates,” Sims said. “Practically all such informal development occurs on agricultural land sold by the original owners.”
DEFINING INFORMALITY: Many of those working in the non-governmental sector say that the lack of accurate official figures on the size of informal areas is because there is no clear-cut definition of what the designation “informal” actually means. Karim Ibrahim, a manager at Tadamun, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working in informal areas, explained that the areas were classified as “unplanned”, meaning that they were not planned by the government and thus do not receive any infrastructural or community services. “Official estimates show that at least 50 to 65 per cent of Greater Cairo consists of unplanned areas,” Ibrahim said. “But the point is that there are also government-planned areas that remain deprived of any services and are not taken into account.” Housing shelters for those relocated from unsafe areas in the 6 October governorate are a case in point. Yehia Shawkat, a researcher and advocate for housing rights at the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights, an NGO, concurred. For him, informal areas are the product of social injustice and are more accurately described as “deprived areas”. The government has designated 400 areas as unsafe. “There have been many other unrecorded cases when buildings near water have collapsed, as was the case last year when 1,000 houses in Sohag were damaged by torrential rains, leaving 4,000 people homeless,” said Shawkat. “But these received hardly any government attention as they were not included in the government plan for unsafe areas.” There have also been cases where the absence of basic services like a proper sewage system, for instance, make an area unsafe. Sewage leakages may ultimately lead to rising levels of groundwater, threatening the safety of buildings, and contaminating drinking water. Official statistics already show that half of all urban areas in Egypt, and an alarming 90 per cent of housing blocs in Upper Egypt's Minya governorate, are not connected to a sewage network. “Many of these areas are not included in the government's plan of unsafe areas,” Shawkat said. “So the issue is not whether residential blocs are built in government-planned areas or on formally owned lands. We should rather look at how many areas are actually deprived of basic infrastructural and social services that could equally render them unsafe. The absence of medical services or a garbage-collection system may also make life unsafe, for example.” In her book Cairo: A Broader View,the American writer Regina Kipper laments “the failure of the Egyptian government's housing policy to provide affordable, viable housing for a significant number of Cairenes,” leading “many to build homes, either legally or illegally, on privately-owned or public lands.” This failure has left poor and limited-income families vulnerable to rising house prices. “People have had to scrounge for their human right to suitable housing, and this has meant building illegally on government-owned and arable land when the price of land and housing units has skyrocketed,” Ibrahim said. High population growth and increasing migration from rural to urban areas have compounded the problem. Estimates show that by 2010, 44 per cent of those living in rural areas had migrated to the city where job opportunities are better. While about 1.6 million people are in need of new accommodation every year, the formal housing sector only provides about 180,000 units annually. In the meantime, a 2006 estimate showed that at least seven million apartments were closed, and this number jumped to 10 million after the 25 January Revolution, according to Ibrahim. “The government cannot provide affordable housing for all those in need, but it can at least offer land at affordable prices and provide people with services and infrastructure to help them build for themselves,” Ibrahim said. Experts say that decades of social injustice have left the poor out of the government's budget priorities. “One third of the government budget for water and sewage, for instance, has been absorbed by the new satellite cities, which are home to a mere two per cent of Egypt's population,” Shawkat said. “The remaining two thirds of the same budget are shared by a majority of 98 per cent of the population living outside such luxurious agglomerations.” A Slum Development Fund was established to help develop the country's shantytowns in the aftermath of a disastrous rockslide that killed dozens of people in the Dweika informal district in 2008. But this fund, many say, has made little headway and has failed to curb the increase in slum areas, since it has limited funds and has lacked a comprehensive strategy that could help halt the phenomenon. There have been a few success stories, including work in the Zeinhom slum area, where people were relocated to nearby government apartment blocks, and the Arab Al-Mohamedi area, which was turned into a park. But these are rare cases. “Zeinhom was a success because it was developed under the auspices of the then first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, a privilege that was lost after the 25 January Revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak,” Ibrahim said. “Now people have to suffer as services are gradually deteriorating.” Many slum areas have been subject to forced evacuation and demolition. More often than not, residents have been relocated to remote government housing in satellite cities on the fringes of Cairo and Giza. “Many of these areas, especially in 6 October, have hardly any services or means of transport,” Ibrahim said. “Unfair relocation has caused many to lose their jobs and school students have had to drop out of schools, all due to the loss of the social networks they enjoyed in their original home areas.”
PRIVATE, DONATION-FUNDED EFFORTS: NGOs have played a major role in alleviating the hardships of those living in informal areas by installing water pipes, building sewage networks, healthcare units, schools and holding literacy classes. Particularly in the 2000s, influential NGOs, seen as “a civil society arm of government”, introduced valuable slum-development projects, according to Egypt's Strategy for Dealing with Slums, a 2014 study from the American University in Cairo (AUC). “They introduced pilots for the on-site development of alternative housing for the slum-dwellers as an alternative to the predominant approach of local government for the resettlement of slum-dwellers in new remote locations,” the study found. The Manshiet Nasser zabbaleen(garbage collectors) neighbourhood is often referred to as a model project of visible, in-depth, and holistic development and perhaps the best intervention to date of NGOs in slum areas. Metaphors of Waste: Several Ways of Seeing “Development” and Cairo's Garbage Collectors, by academicPhilip Jamie Furniss, is one of many studies showing how 40 years of NGO efforts have made significant changes to the lives of the zabaleen. French nun Sister Emmanuelle spearheaded development in the Manshiet Nasser area in the 1970s, putting it on the government's agenda and sparking wider attention. As Furniss wrote, “A deluge of NGOs, for-profit consulting firms, engineers and urban planners, development-oriented foundations, international institutions, religious charities, and others carried out projects targeting the zabaleen.” Prior to the establishment of a compost plant in 1984 by the Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE), an NGO working in the field of garbage recycling, manure from pigs was piled up in the streets. “Today, the manure plant is located in Katameya and the compost is in great demand throughout Egypt,” the APE noted in a statement. “In 1988 and 1991, rug and paper recycling units were established. “This cottage industry specifically targeted women, and they became part of a ‘learn and earn' programme which also taught health, social, educational and economic skills. Additional centres were set up to take care of children while their mothers worked as well as to provide a safe environment for community children in general.” In the 1990s efforts were also made to improve the lives of residents of Tora where garbage collectors lived and public services such as police stations, hospitals and schools were lacking. Disease was rife in the area because it was home to over 13,000 animals and there were no veterinary facilities. The APE intervened to develop the area, and a centre was established for garbage recycling and collection about 19 km away from the Tora housing area. As Furniss writes: “The Manshiet Nasser zabaleenneighbourhood is a showcase of sorts, and its two main NGOs have in important respects become tourist destinations. “On any given day it is possible to meet one or more groups of foreigners taking a tour of the Association for the Protection of the Environment's recycling and needlework projects, or Spirit of Youth's Montessori recycling school.” In addition to such efforts, private individuals have also tried to help. In June 2011, actor Mohamed Sobhi launched a campaign to collect LE1 billion for the development of informal areas nationwide, hoping to convert them into clean areas with piped drinking water. The project, which also enjoyed the support of well-known public figures like television preacher Amr Khaled, actress Hanan Tork, TV presenter Amr Al-Leithi and businessman Niazi Sallam, managed to raise LE110 million for slum relief. The project was launched under the auspices of the armed forces, which reportedly donated LE50 million. The project's slogan is “Together we develop informal areas.” “All the people remaining in Tahrir Square are slum-dwellers,” Sobhi told the press at the outset of the project a few months after the 25 January Revolution. “When I asked them why they were there they said, ‘Staying here is better than the slums, and most of the protesters are people escaping from them'.” According to Sobhi, the project plans to build 5,300 housing units in six slum areas. There will also be schools, cinemas and theatres. Sobhi's concept is that the development of slum areas should be about “building people rather than building buildings.” He explained this concept to the press when he declared the completion of the first stage of the project in the Nahda area off Hai Al-Salam, saying that the project would start in such high-risk areas. Sobhi said he had only managed to collect LE105 million thus far because people still needed to see something on the ground. The project had also encountered bureaucratic challenges, he said, causing various delays. However, these challenges were overcome with the help of the government. The first stage of the project will take two months, he said, and then the second phase will begin, and this will require more people than ever to donate to this “grand national project.” Despite the success of such private, publicly-funded efforts, however, Shawkat says that “NGOs should not be regarded as a substitute for the government because in many cases the lack of a comprehensive plan leads to a waste of funds.” In the absence of proper urban planning, houses have been built in waterlogged areas, and the expansion of sewage networks has led to rising levels of groundwater, endangering the safety of buildings, he added.
THE WAY FORWARD: The issue of informal housing has recently come to the government's attention as a result of the threats it can pose to national security. Slum areas are notorious for providing refuge to terrorists and being havens of crime. There is a consensus among officials and experts alike that social justice is a top priority for a country still healing from two revolutions and hoping to become more stable. A recent government report warned that the most dangerous slum in Cairo is in Maspero, located in the heart of the capital and close to Tahrir Square where the 25 January Revolution erupted. According to Egypt's 2014 constitution, the right to suitable housing is a basic human right guaranteed by the state. Article 78 guarantees that right, recognising the existence of ashwaiyat (informal areas) and obliges the government to take steps to improve them. By virtue of that article, the state should devise a national plan for unplanned areas in a way that would guarantee the provision of suitable, secure and healthy housing. The constitution makes the state responsible for providing such areas with the infrastructure and resources needed to improve the quality of life and the public's health. But the constitution will need to be translated into laws before it can be implemented on the ground. The catch remains that existing laws do not have a clear definition of ashwaiyat, the term that appears in the constitution. “That means we will have to wait until the constitution is translated into a set of laws that will properly address the issue of slums as deprived, rather than just unplanned, areas,” Shawkat insisted. A parliament will need to be elected first, and civil society will have to press for a broader definition of the problem that will help recognise more deprived areas. For now, though, Egypt's new government has established a ministry dedicated to the development of slum areas under the name of the Ministry of Urban Development. Laila Iskander, the woman at the new ministry's helm and a former minister of environmental affairs, has recently been making statements about the ministry's agenda to develop slum areas and allocating funds for them. “Work to redevelop 143 slum areas is already under way, while another 195 are ready to be redeveloped though work has not yet begun. There are a further 26 areas that are being cleared of their inhabitants,” according to a report in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. “Some of the most notorious slums, such as Kafr Nassar, Azbat Jibril and Kafr Arab in Giza, are being developed, as is Kerdasa, where 14 police officers were killed when militants stormed their station in August 2013,” the newspaper added. The military also earlier announced it would donate LE50 million to help build 600,000 housing units for people living in 33 slum areas in Cairo, Suez, Alexandria, Minya and Port Said. According to the project, slum-dwellers would be employed in building their own homes in order to generate employment for the residents of these deprived areas. They would get a guarantee of a rent-free lease, but would not be allowed to own their housing units in order to avoid the units being resold. The military is also launching a joint project with the United Arab Emirates to build one million housing units, again with the aim of curbing the spread of informal housing. In the meantime, the new ministry is seeking a public-private partnership to help solve the problem.“The ministry does have plans, which is good of course, but the problem is that the government will also need to change its negative conception of slum areas,” Ibrahim said. Everybody seems to agree that harsh evacuation and demolition policies should be revised, and more humane policies should be designed to relocate people to nearby areas where they will be able to keep their livelihoods and social networks. “The complexity of the issue of the slums should not be reduced to the decision of whether to relocate them and where to, but rather of how to make slum-dwellers true citizens and active and productive members of society,” the AUC study suggested. “Planning for dealing with slums in this case becomes planning for the inclusive development of these communities and not only the improvement of the urban structures of slums.” The real challenge, according to the study, “remains that the Egyptian government is still dealing with housing merely on the basis of its physical condition or standard and in the case of slums in terms of its safety.” The state budget should also be planned in a way that pays attention to social justice, and a broad strategy should be designed to take into consideration all areas that are deprived of basic services. “Egypt's burgeoning informality needs more than just a ministry to solve it because it falls under the responsibility of more than one government body,” said Shawkat. “The issue of the slums should be put in the hands of a higher cabinet committee that has authority over all government bodies and is thus empowered to put the plans into action. Otherwise, it will be useless just to have another ministry with limited authority.” The budget is also likely to remain an obstacle. Earlier estimates put the cost of developing Cairo's slums at LE1 billion ($140 million). The Cairo governorate has recently released higher estimates of LE6 to 7 billion for resolving the problem of informal housing in the capital alone. Both Ibrahim and Shawkat, however, scoff at such figures, insisting that “it only needs a strong political will to resolve the budget problem.”After all, Shawkat insisted, “the government was able to raise LE60 billion in one week to build the new Suez Canal waterway. “Why not do the same for the slums? It is high time that we looked at developing the slums as a national project.”
