NGO work never far from her mind, Amira El-Noshokaty flits from bricks to sandwiches "I dropped out of school so I could make LE85 a week," recounts Ali Ibrahim, 12, quarry hand at his family mines for a year now. "Working hours are 4pm to 3am in summer, 7am to 4pm in winter. I remember," Ali goes on, "a boy my age came to work here just as I did. He used to put bricks together. He just dropped dead." Ali's job consists of serving tea and water, though he shares the miners' space and working hours; children his age make up 23 per cent of limestone miners in Minya -- a workforce of some 15,000 with neither insurance nor legal rights. Maher Boshra, chairman of the Better Life Association for Comprehensive Development (BLACD) and Wadi El Nile Association for Protection of Quarry Workers, refers to them as "the informal sector", denoting their being neither officially registered nor legally acknowledged by the government: "this sector includes miners, fishermen, peasants, street vendors and builders." BLACD was established in 1995 to cater to the informal sector, improving housing conditions in the relevant villages and eventually setting up the Wadi El Nile Association in 2000, which managed to register some 600 miners in Minya at the Syndicate of Mine Workers. In many ways, Boshra says, it was simply a question of giving voice to the voiceless. The mortality rate is shocking; every month, at least one miner dies. With workers tied to fast-revolving drills without the benefit of protective shields, accidents occur so often that they have lost the element of surprise. In Khaled El-Beshly's Al-Matarid Al-Judud (The New Banished), a Wadi El Nile Association publication, a range of victims from 17-year-old Antoniadis Eid, who lost his leg to the machine, to 46-year-old Mahrous Abdel-Ghani, who lost his eyesight and sustained severe burns from a dynamite explosions, speak out: Eid has received no compensation, while Abdel-Ghani had to wait two years before being granted a monthly pension of LE55 instead of the LE300 he claimed. Minya seems a likely place for such misfortune: it ranks 19 on a 22-level development index in the 2005 Egypt Human Development Report (EHDR); and of the country's 21,538,000 unemployed, it is home to 1,608,000. Unemployment notwithstanding, the miners' work code seems to breach not only International Labour Organisation standards but from Egyptian labour law: employment, health risks and insurance are but a handful of the question marks. "By law, the Ministry of Employment is responsible for coordinating employer- employee relations," Boshra explained. "We are pushing for imposing fines on mines that break the law, and we're working with mine owners to help provide better conditions for their employees." This is complicated, though in some ways also made easier, by the fact that mines tend to be family owned, with members of the same family owning and working a given quarry. Improvements include face masks and covers for cogs and gears as well as electricity outlets. It provides for a comprehensive safety awareness campaign and pre-employment training: "we aim to reach out to 20 mines a year; so far we have covered 12, whose workers are now uniformed and trained." Ibrahim Mohamed, manager and co-owner of one mine, has been in the business for 12 years. His attitude seems to demonstrate Boshra's point that conditions are easily improved: "If not for the quarries, unemployment rates would have doubled. I value my workers and have agreed to provide safety measures." These include, significantly, replacing the usual galabeya, which is more likely to be caught in the drill, with deadly consequences, with overalls, to which a mask and helmet are added, keeping out the dust -- said to cause blindness and respiratory diseases -- and reducing the incidence of head injury. For Mohamed Ali, 19, a miner since his father died seven years ago, the Wadi El Nile Association is doing an indispensable job: "Covering the dangerous parts of the machines and power supplies has saved lived, so has making uniforms obligatory." Six months ago, Ali remembers, he was accidentally exposed to the current; he would have died had a co-worker not cut off the wire just in time. Yet, all things considered, some problems nonetheless persist. For Mohamed and other mine owners, there are prohibitive financial difficulties: "I pay each worker LE15 for every 7,000 bricks made, in addition to the LE40 daily wages of the team workers, from LE15 for a regular worker to LE25 for someone who operates a machine. All of which is not to mention the LE600 I must pay the government every month..." This obviously makes it more difficult to provide for the workers appropriately -- a fact of which Boshra is well aware. Where the mine owners fail, indeed, the Wadi El Nile Association comes in: "we have worked to improve the infrastructure of some 600 homes in the miners' villages. But being the only NGO addressing mine workers across Egypt, our efforts extend to combating child labour as well." Micro-loans are extended to families to help re-enroll children in schools, 100 of whom have been spared mine work so far. Besides this, Boshra -- himself a member of the international non-profit organisation Ashouka Innovators for the Public, which has monitored and encouraged social entrepreneurship since 1980 -- is also trying to apply the latest concepts to improve living conditions and reduce unemployment. THE SCENE opens on a tranquil picture of blue collars breakfasting on fuul and taamia. Zoom onto controversial hygiene issues, then cut -- police are here to harass those food stalls that are unlicensed... Yet the state of street food in Minya has altered considerably since 1986, when Aid of Street Food Vendors in Minya (ASFV) NGO was formed. According to Sarah Loza, founding president of the Social Planning, Analysis and Administration Consultants (SPAAC), street food remains "a remarkable income generating sector, 25 per cent of whose workers are women". Joining forces with the Sociology and Economics Departments of Minya University, SPAAC quickly formed ASFV. Headed by Fatemah Othman, the organisation was awarded the prestigious Samuel Habib Award for excellence in social work in 2002. According to Khaled Saleh, the present director, "ASFV started with 17 food vendors aiming to develop a legal entity for this vast portion of the informal sector -- to help empower street vendors in Minya." Today some 2,400 food vendors belong to the ASFV; five of them are board members. This is no mean feat, considering that the work set out to combat low incomes, illiteracy and lack of awareness among 8,000 or so street vendors in Minya. According to Saleh, "interactive health awareness seminars showing unhealthy habits on video were conducted, and micro-credit loans were extended to improve the conditions of houses, where more than 60 per cent of the meals are prepared, usually no more than a single room inhabited by eight people". ASFV also created a contemporary form of the pushcart, made to incorporate water tanks and enclose the food in glass to protect it from dust and insects; micro-loans were extended to street vendors make the transition from the traditional to contemporary pushcart. Having inherited the job from his father, Maher Fathi -- the recipient of several ASFV certificates of merit after attending the relevant seminars -- has been selling fuul and taamia for more than 15 years: "In the old days, pushcarts were confiscated, sometimes even destroyed, once they were spotted. After my father became a member of the ASFV, things changed to the better. To start out I took out an LE1,000 loan, so I could modernise and stabilise the pushcart I inherited -- which was one of the first 15 carts in Minya Governorate. The loan also enabled me to buy a grinder for the taamia, whereas I used to rent it by the hour. I've developed a loyal base of customers who come to me for a cheap but healthy meal." This would seem to exemplify the notion of aiding rather than eliminating street vendors, an important side of the battle against unemployment. In Metropolitan Food System of Cairo, Egypt -- the result of a Freiburg University Institute of Cultural Geography research project funded by the German Research Foundation -- journalist and scholar Said Samir classifies street food vendors into mobile, semi- mobile and fixed categories, noting that all three, along with other squatter market traders, are supervised by no less than four different authorities: the Market Control Police (Ministry of Interior), the Health Department (Ministry of Health), the governorate and the Ministry of Housing and Utilities. Though required, a licence to sell food is a rare thing indeed; the law is complicated, with the issuing of licences suspended in 1964 to be replaced by a sound health certificate for the vendor, issued haphazardly at LE10 in most public hospitals; such certificates are moreover hardly sufficient as protection against state-endorsed raids which, as well as imposing fines, will often damage a vendor's infrastructure and his commodities. Vendors lose money due to the time they spend at police stations, where they are routinely humiliated. Many of these fledgling businesses do not in fact survive a raid. ASFV intervention has thus far managed to bridge gaps by holding meetings in which officials and vendors are represented. According to Saleh, "first we helped vendors have the required documents, including licenses, then we gave them membership cards validating their legal status by way of preventing haphazard harassment." Ali Abdel-Kafi is an example of the kind of success that can be achieved. An ice-cream vendor often harassed by the police, he joined ASFV some 20 years ago and has since pooled efforts with four of his peers who used an LE30,000 loan to open a small ice-cream factory in 1995, the sole legal source of ice-cream in Minya and a permanent source of income for some 40 legally registered vendors: "each tank, costing LE15 to fill with ice cream, can sell up to 500 cones at a total of LE50. Raw material is purchased in Cairo, processed at the factory. And no vendor is allowed to keep leftover ice cream overnight. From the air-conditioned van to the freezer and back, if necessary." Yet obstacles like limited finances and infrequent health inspections by the government are proving harder to manage. ASFV is now lobbying for the extension of health tests to all family members, who tend to take part in the preparation of food, granting vendors health insurance and raising their pensions. More significantly, though a nationally oriented project, extending the success in Minya to other governorates has proved difficult. With changes in governors and hence governorate policy, communication has been hard to maintain; and battling with contradictory laws issued at different times since the 1980s has been made all the more difficult in the light of the general drive to clear major cities of vendors along with beggars and the homeless. According to Loza, who is currently launching a five-year plan to establish several NGOs to work towards the same end in different governorates, building a market for the benefit of vendors "would not solve the problem: these people are very specifically customer-oriented and 85 per cent of them, though technically mobile, have had fixed locations for up to 25 years; they would comply with health inspection as they don't want to lose their customer base". As Loza says, indeed, street vendors are "part of our culture". Such famous restaurants as Nagaf and Saber, for fuul and ice-cream, respectively, started out as food vendors. "Even Kentucky Fried Chicken started out as a street vendor," she says. "That's yet another reason why we should continue to support this sector."
