Spiralling population growth, bullying and sexual harassment were campaigns that saw light during 2018 with the aim of fighting all three in Egyptian society. Etnein Kefaya (Two [Children] is Enough) was launched in mid-2018 by the Ministry of Social Solidarity targeting women covered by the Takaful programme, which provides financial support to poor households with children 18 and over. It also seeks to improve access to jobs, stabilise accommodation and offer literacy courses. The two-year campaign started in June with the aim of reaching 1.2 million women in 10 governorates to raise their awareness about the correct contraceptive methods and to give birth to a maximum of two children. The campaign is being implemented with the help of 100 NGOs which provide the ministry with trained volunteers in order to visit the targeted families. The programme is also supported by the United Nations Population Fund that provides LE10 million to train doctors and nurses involved in the participating clinics, as well as medical units with contraceptives. With an annual growth rate of almost two per cent, Egypt's population is expected to pass 100 million in 2019. Randa Fares, coordinator for population programmes and volunteerism at the Ministry of Social Solidarity, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the project is following to the letter its planned schedule. “Since the launch of the campaign, we managed to sign collaboration contracts with 92 NGOs which we studied beforehand to make sure they received widespread publicity and thus gain access to underprivileged areas.” Fares said that during the last couple of months they joined efforts with NGOs to train 2,000 volunteers, “as studies show that families are more accepting of a person who comes from a similar background and social class”. Despite the fact that the campaign has not yet firmly planted its feet on the ground, a difference has been sensed by authorities in people's reactions towards using birth control. “I met a woman who has to spend three hours on the road to reach the nearest medical unit to get birth control pills. Her husband told her that giving birth to and raising new kids is less a hassle than going to the clinic. “It is hard to change the way they think but you can make the change easier if you make birth control methods more accessible by providing them with a nearby birth control medical unit,” Fares explained. Two is Enough relies on door-to-door visits, advertisements and establishing birth control medical units in remote areas, as well as providing the existing ones with contraceptives. Since it was launched, according to Fares, the ministry is making progress on the three fronts. “We provided our volunteers with a booklet of the most common misconceptions about family planning and birth control and we train the volunteers how to try to correct these for the targeted families,” she added. The 1.2 million families are divided among the NGOs that are currently in the last stages of preparations before hitting the ground at the beginning of January. “It took us all these months to sign protocols with the NGOs, and picking our volunteers before the actual work starts. However, this stage is the most important as it is the building block of the project,” she explained. Billboards numbering 1,100 are being erected at the entrance of the targeted villages as well as in Cairo. The billboards showcase two families: the first has only two children while the second has many offspring. The ads show a loaf of bread divided into two pieces in the first ad and five in the second. The simple message, according to Fares: birth control can help lift families out of poverty. “We also posted thousands of posters on tok-toks, the main form of transportation in such areas, for people to see the ads everywhere,” she added. Bullying campaign The teaser campaign was met with huge success, as hundreds of families now head to birth control medical units asking for a way to control or plan their families, even before the official start of the door-to-door visits. While birth control seeks to provide a decent life for children, others are trying to make children's lives easier by dealing with the psychological burden of bullying. Earlier this year UNICEF launched Egypt's first anti-bullying campaign hoping to end all sorts of peer-to-peer violence, especially the verbal. The campaign was the result of cooperation between the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), Ministry of Education and Technical Education and is funded by the European Union. Through a set of videos showing the Middle East's most famous superstars, including actors Ahmed Helmi and Mona Zaki, who share their childhood experiences of being called names and mocked, the celebrities are hoping to raise people's awareness about bullying, and asking them to combat it. The one-month campaign also provides 24/7 support given by specialists at the national Child Helpline 16000. Just days after its start, the campaign sparked a wave of interaction among children aged 6-18 and their parents. Thousands of calls showered the hotline about children who are being bullied, bullies and others who are feeling helpless while standing silently by as they see their friends being ridiculed at school. The campaign touched the hearts of millions of children who thought their sufferings went unseen. Bruno Maes, UNICEF's representative in Egypt, told the Weekly that the campaign reached more than 97 million users on UNICEF's digital platforms, with more than 44 million actively engaged with the campaign, while its videos reached 21.3 million views. “People are now using the term tanammor [bullying] which was relatively new to the public and was introduced by the campaign to refer to all forms of psychological and physical bullying,” Maes said. Azza Al-Ashmawi, secretary-general of the NCCM, told the press that the hotline received over 30,000 calls since the start of the campaign with an average of 1,800-2000 calls per day, and over 20,000 messages through Facebook. Two weeks after the launching, NCCM published a primary research analysis on the number of calls the hotline received, revealing that most were from children aged 10-12. Seventy per cent of them were males. Maes added that children called the NCCM helpline because they wanted to know how to deal with bullying while others called to learn about how to convince their brothers and sisters to stop bullying other children. He added that in one TV show a child called in to share his experience as a bully and told the TV host that he had not realised how much his actions were hurting his classmate, but after having seen the campaign, he decided to call the TV show to apologise to his classmate on air. A month before the year ended came the launch of the Middle East's largest campaign combating sexual harassment, Speak Up. The campaign was launched by Egypt's ministries of investment and international cooperation, youth and sport, and transportation, and the National Council for Women, as well as the French Agence Francaise de Development, Germany's GIZ, and USAID, celebrating the International Day of Combating Violence against Women and the beginning of 16 days of activism to end violence against them. Speak Up encourages females to talk about their experiences and not stay silent during and after the incident, and for men to support harassed women. Sexual harassment Though the campaign started just a few weeks ago, it has already encouraged many women to share their stories about harassment online. In 2017, a report published by Reuters stated that Cairo is the world's most dangerous mega-city for women. However, officials deny this, saying that the percentage of Egyptian females facing any kind of sexual harassment is only 9.6 per cent. Hoda Zakaria, a professor of political sociology at Zagazig University and a member of the High Supreme of Media Regulations, told the Weekly that people have started increasing their interactions with such social campaigns due to the modern message they use “which directly connects to them”. “For years, the messages Egyptians received through such social campaigns were far from their real interests, struggles and demands, something that the content makers started changing in the past few years,” Zakaria said. She cited the 1990s and early 2000s when the message from family planning campaigns was that having too many children would distort women's figures and make them gain weight which would lead their husbands to eventually remarry. The content creators once believed that they could fight years of tradition, illiteracy and misunderstanding of religious positions towards family planning by convincing a woman that her body will not look beautiful if she gave birth so many times, she added. One of the major reasons for the success of the current campaigns is that they have started to focus on a specific audience and that they are based on studying ways of getting into their lives by showing concern and understanding to their needs and backgrounds. Fares, of the Ministry of Social Solidarity, said that they spent months of research to discover that the most widely heard radio station in rural areas is the Quran Radio Station, so they broadcast awareness ads through it. It was also found that tok-toks are the most effective way to spread the campaign calls by sticking ads on them. Maes added that NGOs and corporates play massive roles in reaching people. “Raising public awareness and changing negative practices require collective will and contributions as it is not an isolated campaign or one-year process. There is a need to sustain achievements and build on them and this can only be accomplished by joining hands,” he explained. However, Zakaria adds, raising public awareness is not the only goal that institutions should be looking at. Conveying the message that the campaigns' effects are sustainable and are in the long-term beneficial to the people is one of the main factors that guarantees their success.
