Egypt is negotiating a $100 million loan from the African Development Bank Group to finance the country's plan to upgrade slums nationwide, international cooperation minister Sahar Nasr announced Sunday. Nasr further said her ministry would dedicate part of the $500 million World Bank loan to develop slums. Earlier, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said in June that the government would complete the development of slums and poor villages in the next two years. Egypt's official statistics agency CAPMAS recently said in a statement that slums make up 38.6 percent of the inhabited land mass across Egyptian cities. Slums are spread over 226 out of Egypt's 234 cities. Only eight cities in the provinces of Suez, Sharqiya, Kafr al-Sheikh, and Giza are clear of slum areas, the agency added. Unsafe slum areas occupy 2.8 percent of all slums in Egypt, with unsafe slums of the second degree of risk occupying 71.5 percent of the country's unsafe slums. The state-run agency added that 33 of the unplanned slum areas in the capital, Cairo, and adjacent Giza have undergone development work funded by the Slum Development Fund. The government aims to prepare a nationwide map of unplanned areas and develop 27 of them annually in Egypt's 27 provinces during the period between 2016 and 2019, according to CAPMAS.
