CAIRO - About 10.1 million people in Egypt are living in homes that could collapse at any moment, according to non-governmental groups. Some of these houses, constructed of sheets of metal or wood, are nothing less than death traps, they say. This was revealed during a conference on activating economic development, held recently in Cairo and organised by the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Last year, the Government-run Development Fund of Shantytowns (DFS) launched a project to develop unsafe areas in 14 governorates over the next six years. Cairo has the lion's share of all Egypt's unsafe areas 52 areas or 13 per cent of the total. Qena Governorate comes next with 9.7 per cent, then Giza and Kafr el-Sheikh with 6.4 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively. Millions of Egyptians reside in shantytowns and slums. They typically live in a small room, with inadequate sewerage, perhaps sharing a bathroom with two or three other families, while they dream of a better life. In eastern Cairo in September 2008, eight huge rocks fell from the Moqattam Hills onto Deweiqa, a shantytown below, flattening more than 50 houses and crushing hundreds of residents to death. Many slum dwellers have to walk down the road to someone else's home every day, in order to fetch water, which they carry home on their heads in aluminium or plastic containers. According to the German Agency for Technical Co-operation (GTZ), the number of Egyptians living in unsafe homes is actually more than the figures revealed by the Government. “Between 17 and 20 million people live in shantytowns,” according to Mohamed el-Azazi, the former head of the Sadat Academy, who participated in research into the problem, conducted by GTZ. El-Azazi added in comments to theprivate Al-Shorouq newspaper that the German agency drew up a map of the shantytowns and deprived areas in Egypt 15 years ago and submitted it to the Government, which only ignored it. According to the DFS estimates, the population density in shantytowns is around 500 inhabitants per feddan, housed in buildings with up to ten floors. The Fund says that this huge problem requires a long- or medium-range development, to which both the Government and the private sector should contribute.
