“There are few police in Ezbet Al-Haggana, and harassment may reach more than 81 per cent. Maybe it has decreased now, but it is still high despite the efforts made to fight it by local NGOs like Al-Shehab,” says Korolos Eid, a volunteer at the Al-Shehab Foundation in Ezbet Al-Haggana, a poorer Cairo district. He said the foundation faced challenges as to how to educate young men about the problems some young women faced. “Some young people did not realise the extent of the problem, but we have managed to train them. We now have more than 65 volunteers in the district from both sexes, and we raise the awareness of children about harassment through plays or sports. If each young person involved is able to change the thinking of a further 65, eventually we will be able to reach 65 families, and those 65 can then reach a million or more through speaking to their friends,” Eid said. However, there is still limited data or a lack of reliable statistics on informal urban areas in Egypt and particularly about the young people living in them, and for this reason the Population Council in partnership with the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) conducted a comprehensive situational analysis of young people living in informal urban areas in Greater Cairo last year, the Survey of Young People in Informal Urban Areas of Greater Cairo (SYPE-IGC). The efforts of youth will eventually positively change the lives of inhabitants of poorer neighbourhoods According to the survey, young people's concerns about security in their areas focussed more on social issues than about infrastructure, accidents or violence. The three security challenges most widely cited were the prevalence of drug use (62.1 per cent), drug-dealing (60.1 per cent) and street harassment (48.0 per cent). The most commonly reported types of violence were being insulted in private (7.7 per cent) or in front of others (8.4 per cent). The reported rates of harassment among young women (49 per cent) in 2016 were slightly higher than those for formal urban Greater Cairo (46 per cent) in the SYPE-IGC 2014 Survey. “The statistics in the field of public services are close to reality. Some people say they would be willing to help, but in reality this is not always the case. As a result, we can help fix problems related to electricity, for example, before resorting to the government,” said Hani Sharkawi, a researcher at the Tadamon Foundation which works in informal areas. The majority of young people in the informal areas belong to the third and fourth household wealth segments (59.3 per cent), and only 25.6 per cent of them belong to the poorest two household wealth segments. Almost 98 per cent of all the dwellings in informal Greater Cairo are connected to the public sewage network, and 99 per cent are connected to public drinking water. Some of them complain about the quality of the services, however, and waste disposal can be a problem in informal neighbourhoods. According to the 2016 survey, the services that young people thought should be given priority for improvement were education (26.1 per cent) and health (18.6 per cent). This was followed by programmes to employ young people and train them for the labour market (11.2 per cent) and improving roads and streets (10.8 per cent). When asked what they would do if faced with a problem of basic services, over one-third of young people said that the people in the area either solved it themselves (15.5 per cent) or found the money to fix it (24.7 per cent). About a third said that they would call the authorities. When asked about their own participation in initiatives to improve the neighbourhood during the past year, only three per cent of young people said they had participated. Some 51.7 per cent said they would be willing if they had time or believed in the importance of the initiative, the survey said. The efforts of youth will eventually positively change the lives of inhabitants of poorer neighbourhoods “The statistics express the reality we found in the Mansheyet Nasser district of Cairo, where we helped train young people to deal with unemployment. We trained 38 girls and young men in craft work, and we were surprised to find that these young people sometimes distrusted civil society initiatives, feeling that they would be abandoned after training. However, we provided them with jobs and opportunities to sell their products in fairs, and we still had trouble making the training classes known and in knowing what kind of crafts were needed,” Amr Fayez, head of monitoring at the Misr Foundation for Culture and Social Development, an NGO that works in informal areas, said. “Trust is a by-product of monitoring. We found that when young people have trust they work well. There are now eight workshops in Mansheyet Nasser owned by young people who make bags and accessories for women and porcelain ware,” he said. WORKING FOR WOMEN: Women are often still the most marginalised in terms of opportunities compared to their male peers in informal areas and even their female peers living in the formal parts of the country, according to the survey findings. Labour force participation among young women (aged 15-29) living in informal Greater Cairo was only 15.8 per cent in 2016, compared to 57.8 per cent among their male peers. It was also strikingly lower than the equivalent rate observed for young women living in the formal parts of Greater Cairo (20.3 per cent) in the 2014 survey. Fayez explained that fathers sometimes prevent their daughters from working or even taking part in activities, which was one reason behind the statistics and meant that more work had to be done on raising awareness. The survey found that the unemployment rate of young people living in informal areas of Greater Cairo was 9.9 per cent in 2016, compared to 12.2 per cent in 2014. The male youth unemployment rate (6.1 per cent) was lower in informal areas than in formal neighbourhoods (11.8 per cent), but the unemployment rate among young women in informal areas of Greater Cairo (25.7 per cent) was more than four times that of young men in 2016 and almost double the rates documented for young women living in formal parts of Greater Cairo in 2014 (13.9 per cent). The efforts of youth will eventually positively change the lives of inhabitants of poorer neighbourhoods Over half of young people in both formal (59.2 per cent) and informal (55.5 per cent) urban areas of Greater Cairo were working in the informal private wage sector, whether on a regular or irregular basis, the survey found. Almost one fifth of them were working in non-wage jobs. However, among young women, non-wage work was more common in informal (16.8 per cent) than in formal (six per cent) urban areas, the survey said. “Over 95 per cent of those working with us are volunteers. We discovered that children in schools from the third year primary to the sixth year primary in informal areas were neither able to read nor write, so we joined together to help them in a short period of time,” said Hadir Eid, a teacher at the Nebni (We Build) Foundation in Mansheyet Nasser. “Just to see these children being able to read and write was our incentive, which was better than any financial one for any of us,” she said. Sharkawi agreed. “If young people in informal areas felt that the issue they were volunteering to do was really for them, they would feel rewarded. If they believe in it, they work hard. What is important is that the volunteers are from the same target district as the young people, as this is also a moral incentive for the inhabitants,” he said. His foundation could also help with housing issues, he added. The survey cited illiteracy rates among young people between the ages of 15-29 in informal Greater Cairo as 4.2 per cent. It was higher among young women in these areas (six per cent), compared not only to their young male peers (2.6 per cent) but also to that of young women living in formal urban areas (1.7 per cent). However, almost 27.4 per cent of young people in informal Greater Cairo managed to reach a university level of education, compared to 35 per cent in formal urban areas. Strikingly, there was no gender gap in university graduation in both formal and informal urban areas of Greater Cairo in 2016. “Aqran Masr [Peers of Egypt] was established by the UN in 2005, and we are one of the many volunteer groups that work in reproductive health awareness for young people in Egypt. We implement what is called ‘peer culturing', which is when young people help each other by reaching them in their own way,” said Mohamed Khedr, co-coordinator of the Aqran Culturing Network in Daqahliya governorate. The network works in villages where addiction may have spread among young people. It organises lectures followed by football matches that aim at teaching young people how to protect themselves from addiction. “We co-operated with the Ministry of Health to organise an infantile paralysis inoculation campaign, followed by an anti-teenage marriage lecture to ensure that young people would attend as people will often not attend lectures without an activity as well,” he said. According to the 2016 survey, young people in the informal urban areas of Greater Cairo expressed an overall feeling of good health, with 44.6 per cent indicating that their health was excellent or very good, compared to 47.5 per cent among their peers in formal areas in 2014. Some 75.2 per cent of young people aged 15-29 residing in informal urban areas of Greater Cairo had never been married. Early marriage (before the legal age of 18) was slightly more prevalent in the informal urban areas (10.2 per cent) than in the formal urban areas of Greater Cairo (8.5 per cent). Young people were asked about their opinions on the ideal marriage age for both men and women. Only 2.9 per cent of young men and women said that the ideal age for a girl to get married was less than 18. More young women than men preferred later marriage (above 22 years) for women, with the majority viewing the age range from 18-22 years as the ideal marriage age for women, the survey found. SURVEY RESULTS: The launch of the survey results was in December 2016 under the auspices of Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Administrative Reform Ashraf Al-Arabi, Minister of Social Solidarity Ghada Wali and Minister of Youth and Sports Khaled Mahmoud. The launch was attended by representative of the Population Council Nahla Abdel-Tawab, chair of CAPMAS Abu Bakr Al-Guindi, and representative of the Ministry of Housing Mohamed Essam, among others. “The Population Council conducts research into the areas of poverty, gender and youth. The last is one of the main areas of focus. This is the fourth in the series of surveys that looked at the needs of young people in Egypt. The first was conducted in 1997, then in 2009, then in 2014, and then the present one, which focuses on the needs of young people in informal areas of Greater Cairo. It looks at various aspects of their lives, like education, employment, marriage, and civic and political participation,” Abdel-Tawab said. “We believe that the results of the survey could be useful to policy-makers because they provide accurate data on the needs of young people in Egypt and also their potential. One of the pleasant surprises that we got out of this research was that the living conditions of young people in informal areas was not as bad as we had thought,” she said, adding that their needs resembled those of other areas. “They are significantly better off than young people in rural areas, but they also have certain needs, problems like the lack of services or lack of quality of these services, some security issues, and also the issue of discrimination and marginalisation. So these are the main issues that the government should address through involving young people. The surveys have found that there is a lot of potential among young people in these areas, but this potential can only be realised if we work collaboratively with them and involve them in improving the quality of their lives,” Abdel-Tawab said. Al-Guindi said that the government's Egypt 2030 Strategy pointed to the importance of finding fundamental solutions to the problem of the development of the informal areas. This could only be through building 7.5 million housing units by the end of 2030 through the governmental, public, and private sectors, he said. This was in addition to permanently solving the problems of such areas by 2030 in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The responses of young people revealed that good infrastructure (71.8 per cent) and proximity to workplaces (68.3 per cent) were the most important factors if they were to accept relocation, followed closely by proximity to means of public transport (65.3 per cent) and the presence of basic services (63.3 per cent). A sample of 2,947 young people aged 15-29 from the three governorates of Greater Cairo (Cairo, Giza and Qalioubiya) were interviewed for the survey. It collected information about what these young people were most concerned about in their communities, as well as on priorities they identified for improvements in their neighbourhoods and suggestions for how to carry these out. “Films affect children to a great extent, and if a child sees a character he likes in a film he may be ready to imitate him, which could be a way of changing behaviour for the better,” commented Eid. “We succeeded in convincing some housewives to take part in sports activities we organised in youth centres and to bring their children with them. They had a lot of fun, and the interaction helped them to exchange experiences and learn from each other,” he added. “We need to know the priorities of the government. We can work on public services and education, but we need to look at the needs of the society as well. The trouble is that there are few incentives for those who volunteer. The government should work on providing young people with such incentives by co-operating with volunteers to help them improve or provide services that are not there through job opportunities and so on,” commented Sharkawi. “If the government provided us with a youth centre, we would be ready to organise activities there,“ Khedr said, adding that this would be a way of reaching ever larger numbers of people. Abdel-Tawab said that young people shared similar problems no matter where they lived, but that the real problem in informal areas was marginalisation. “We should change the way we look at people who live in such areas. We need to look at them as potential, as capital that we need to work with, and to collaborate with them to improve their lives. We must not look at them as a source of problems or try to isolate them,” she said. “It is by working together that all of us can win.”
