The villagers of Bassaysa in Al-Sharqiya took the initiative to create a new village in the desert for their younger generation, writes Samia Farid Shihata* While most of us were busy complaining about overcrowding, environmental degradation, and rising unemployment, the inhabitants of the tiny village of Bassaysa in Al-Sharqiya governorate were busy implementing their own answer to each and every one of these challenges. Bassaysa is a typical satellite village in the heart of the Nile Delta, 15 kilometres northwest of Zagazig. In 1978, guided and led by their mentor, Dr. Salah Arafa, Physics professor at AUC, the 320 inhabitants of Bassaysa, set out to transform their village, one of about 30,000 such poor, marginalized villages in Egypt characterized by the absence of practically everything: schools, electricity, clean water, a sewage system, drainage, roads, etc...You name it. They didn't have it. Arafa, began his efforts by diligently patiently spending every Friday in Bassaysa in discussions with the villagers on how to identify and then solve their problems through active community participation and collaboration. After two years, volunteers from the American University in Cairo began to join him on his weekend trips. Arafa's vision was to implement a sustainable community-centered model of development. His model was based on the conviction that only when citizens are well educated and well-informed can they participate actively and successfully in their own development. With the active participatory approach as their starting point, Arafa and his volunteers spent many years patiently encouraging all the villagers to take part in setting the villages' needs and priorities. Together, step by step, they formulated a program for action that included literacy classes, training in agriculture, use of local natural resources, and most importantly, group collaboration and shared responsibility for implementation. The village's new found knowledge and the community's involvement in defining its own needs and objectives led to the introduction of new ideas that hitherto had been beyond the comprehension of the villagers. Community discussions quickly determined that illiteracy was a critical obstacle to the village's development. But there were practical hurdles that needed to be overcome in order to deal with this problem. For example, the limited number of educated youth who could conduct the literacy classes barely had any free time, given the long time it took for them to walk to and from schools several kilometers away and the family chores they had to complete every day. It was therefore decided to buy them bicycles, one at a time, on installments, to shorten their commute so they would have time to participate in this important community objective. But even so, most classes would need to be held after sundown, therefore, a proper source of light would be needed. This led to a village discussion on what the best source of energy would be, which in turn led to their setting up of a solar electricity unit that was eventually followed by the adoption of other renewable energy options such as wind mills and biogas. Thus, one thing led to another, and by 1992, Basayssa had become a model for innovative sustainable community development based on knowledge, self help and use of local natural resources. Its impact reached well beyond Egypt. But that's only the first part of the Bassaysa story. Despite, the impressive improvement in the village's living conditions, youth unemployment in Bassaysa remained a challenge. The inhabitants of Bassaysa decided once again to take charge of their own future by facing this challenge head on. While a youth training program to prepare young graduates to manage their own enterprises and help them obtain loans, had already been set up with the help of Egypt's Social Development Fund, business opportunities remained scarce. In 1992, continuing discussions of the unemployment problem among the trainees led to the formation of a collective cooperative project, initially with 28 members, aimed at forming a new community in the desert. The search for an appropriate location thus began, and from among three alternatives identified by the search group, a plot of 250 feddans in the Ras Sudr area in South Sinai was chosen. Today, New Bassaysa covers 750 feddans communally owned by about 100 members, all literate. Each young person was given five feddans to cultivate at his own pace, and membership in the cooperative was also opened to interested youth from outside Bassaysa. Investors not wishing to move there were also accepted, provided they employed another young person to cultivate the land. The maximum allocation for individual investors was set at 20 feddans. The inclusion of larger investors to the cooperative, all bound by the rules agreed upon by the general membership, was instrumental in providing the cash infusions needed for the project to progress at a steady pace. But how were poor villagers able to finance their share of the land purchase and to contribute to the cooperative's running expenses? Essentially, a system was devised based on the village's traditional system of economic cooperation called the gam'eya. This is an arrangement of rotational credit where a group of individuals agree to pay a certain amount of money every month to a common fund. Each month one member gets to draw the total amount for his/her needs. Arafa recounts how the system was modified, to finance the community development projects: " We set up a system of collective savings and individual loans. In this system any member can save any amount of money on a monthly basis for a one-year period, after which he or she is eligible for an interest-free loan, to be paid back over three years." Still based on the active participatory approach, the community decided on the communal cultivation of the land and the allocation of a 400 sq.m. plot of land to each member on which to build a one story house with a garden. All houses would have to be built according to the environmentally friendly rules set by the community. "There is a solar electricity plant in the village now," says Arafa. " Our aim is for everyone to have a solar house." The community also settled on olive and jojoba trees, both oil producing, as the most suitable crops for their project. To further raise incomes, the cooperative's plan is to eventually establish a complete plant to produce, package and market their oil. While New Bassaysa remains a work in progress, Arafa seizes every chance he gets to demonstrate that it is a model that can be replicated all over Egypt. However, he notes, "We can't accomplish this with the type of societies that we now know. We need to design a new type of society based on bringing knowledge to the grassroots level, ensuring real (not fake) community participation, relying on local resources, and utilizing an integrated approach that is attentive to the needs of the local community as a whole, not just isolated sections of that community." * The writer is an economic consultant who recently visited the village of New Bassaysa in Ras Sudr, Sinai.
