Amira El-Noshokaty watches as young NGOs define a necessary concept Over the weekend the open-air space of El-Sawy Culture Wheel was overflowing with booths and flyers promising partnership for a better future -- all in the name of development. The event? The first Real Vacation Initiative, the work of the Egyptian Youth Federation in collaboration with associations like Meshwar, Development No Boarders (DNB) and Al-Halimoun Bilghad (Dreamers of Tomorrow). With the slogan "Create, cooperate and achieve", DNB was the first to come up with the idea of organising an alternative way of spending the summer: a youth NGO fair exhibiting all manner of possibilities for voluntary work. As Mary Ghali, official DNB representative put it, "we are focussed on the human factor." Being part of the EuroMed youth programme, DNB strives to train "informal ambassadors" through international activities. Likewise for Meshwar, whose public relations representative Heba Hassan was equally enthusiastic: "It's a great opportunity to approach young members of our society and channel their skills towards community service." As co-organiser, she went on to explain, Meshwar provides Egyptians living below the poverty line with medical care, educational funds, literacy classes and job opportunities. Dating back to the turn of the 19th century, civil society in Egypt has played a tangible role on the social and economic fronts. Some 15,000 NGOs are now in existence, and with some three million volunteers now catering to 23 million Egyptians, according to Egypt's first 2003 Human Development Report (EHDR), it seems only right that voluntary work should be thus advertised to the young. This is particularly true since, despite such impressive numbers, in Egypt the voluntary work sector lacks consistency, awareness and sustainability. According to the 2005 EHDR, indeed, voluntary work is a vital part of the development process; neglecting it as a factor in policy-making means overlooking a valuable asset and possibly undermining traditions of cooperation within communities. For her part Sannia Suleiman -- representative of the Hawaa Al-Mustaqbal society for family and environmental development, winner of the Coptic Evangelic Organisation for Social Services (CEOSS) and home to 200 regular volunteers on average -- points out that not all NGOs know how to manage volunteers: "the key is building individual capacities, by gauging out areas of interest and the best way to invest time and effort." This makes a fair like the present one sound like the first step. "This is my first time at such a fair," said Shaimaa Samir, a potential volunteer, while checking stands. "I think it's a great idea to have several NGOs gather in the same place. It makes it that much easier to choose to volunteer." Nor is the idea of gathering to be overlooked: the fair itself emphasised the importance of networking among the Egyptian Youth NGOs. Among Resala NGO's latest efforts, for example, is "recycling used books", a process that involves restoring and reselling valuable books pooled from any number of partner organisations and sending the rest to be recycled as paper. For his part Bakr Ahmed, representative of Zealousness for Accomplishing Development (ZAD), another young NGO, seeks to connect young Egyptians all over the country through a new project, Egypt- Train, which will enable rail-facilitated exchange. "The pity," declaimed Walaa Mohsen, a mass communication student and volunteer for the Egyptian Media Development Foundation (EMDF), "is that the vast majority of such efforts receive very little if any media exposure." Once again a new initiative, Eye on Civil Society, was announced: mass communication student and graduate volunteers will be trained to observe and monitor the activities of civil society. "Our job is to raise awareness of the positive role of civil society and its impact on the public." Even a small number of volunteers is a triumph, according to Ahmed Gamal, DNB's official representative: he emphasised the importance of the media, and the fact that it is civil society-shy, expressing his hope to bridge that gap: "two TV interviews would be more effective than 100 flyers. There has never been a movie or TV serial that involved a character doing any kind of voluntary work." That said, the fact, as expressed by the 2005 EHDR, remains: "achieving the millennium development goals will require the ingenuity, solidarity and creativity of millions of ordinary people through voluntary action."
