CAIRO: The Ministry of Social Solidarity and the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo (AUC) joined forces in order to alleviate poverty in the governorates of Sohag and Assiut in Upper Egypt. The project titled “Innovating Social Policy to Tackle Child Poverty in Upper Egypt,” is funded by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and “works to introduce a new category for the conditional cash-transfer program making it more citizenship oriented and rights-based,” according to a statement by AUC. “We want to recognize people's rights to this (cash) rather than hand it out to them,” said Hania Sholkamy, assistant professor at the SRC. “We used poverty maps to rank the villages in Egypt that show you who the poorest people are and we select our intervention villages and control group from Sohag and Assiut,” explained Sholkamy. As part of the project, there is the conditional-cash transfer program (CCT) through which families will be given LE 200 every month as long as they meet certain conditions set by the ministry, which are first, 85 percent attendance in school every month and second, regular medical checkups for the children. “The mission of CCT is to break the inter-generational cycle of poverty,” said Sholkamy. When adopting the concept that you only get cash if your child goes to school and goes through an annual checkup, it will help solve many of the problems related to poverty in Egypt. “Poor children will become poorer and will reproduce poorer children if they are not provided with education and proper health,” she said, pointing out that “We are doing this for the future.” The project will also include intervention tools such as self-monitoring tools which are made to give the families the feeling of being in control. There will also be monthly meetings with groups and beneficiaries. Groups from the SRC and the Ministry of Social Solidarity will meet with beneficiaries once a month to check if the families are receiving their money and if the social workers are doing their job. “If scaled up, this project will be an entitlement for Egyptian families,” said Sholkamy, who describes the program in terms of equity and balance between the poor and the very poor. “We are not going to just distribute money and solve everyone's problem. We need to maintain integrity as a social intervention program,” she emphasized. According to Sholkamy, “this is very different than other projects because it is work that has a consequence, not research work per say, but research work for policy,” she said. “The difficulty is how you make sure the program has real integrity.” SRC's strives to affect policy formulation and implementation while contributing to knowledge in the social sciences, it also aims to contribute to developing skills and building institutional capacity in the region as well as to advance public debate about important issues. This is not the first time AUC partners with the ministry, in 2007 they worked to develop an effective social policy that aims to empower vulnerable families and break the cycle of poverty through the application of an integrated support package.
