CAIRO: Upper Egypt needs more attention, more developmental projects and more investments, said the latest United Nations Development Project (UNDP) report on human development covering eight Egyptian governorates. Although the provinces surveyed spanned Egypt as a whole, equally highlighting setbacks and improvements, Upper Egypt was found to be the most lacking. The call for women's social and political empowerment was a recurrent element throughout the report, which also tackled health, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and women's empowerment in Cairo, Damietta, Port Said, Suez, South Sinai, the Red Sea, El-Wady El-Gedeed and Luxor. Minister of Local Development Abdel Salam Mahgoub and the governors of Cairo and Damietta attended the discussions of the report on Sunday, lauding some of its points and contesting others. While the report's chief researcher Ibrahim Moharram stressed the lack of clean water and sewage systems in many villages, Mahgoub on the other hand said that "there are no residential compounds in Egypt without clean water. He praised the government's ongoing project that aims "at improving quality of life, and lauded its "ambitious one and a half year plan that he claims brought in clean water to every compound. Mahgoub also said that women are starting to take on leadership roles in the country, adding that it "is not enough but it's a start. The minister promised to use the report in future development planning and hoped for future reports that show the "current quality of life in the absence of centralization. Over 148 researchers worked on the report with the help of official information sources such as the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) and the Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) among others. Cairo Governor Abdel Azim Wazir praised the report calling it "a leap in its genre. He promised to take the information it provides into consideration in future plans for Cairo. Yet, not all governors were happy with the report's findings as Damietta governor called it a "threat to national security, as six of the 100 poorest towns in Egypt mentioned in the report are in Damietta. The governor was furious as he "got letters of criticism from the minister of local development because Damietta is home to a town where poverty allegedly reached 100 percent. "Talking too much about poverty creates frustration, Mohamed Fathy El-Baradie, Damietta governor, said.
