CAIRO – It was a nightmare for the residents of el-Deweiqa, a shantytown near Manshiyet Nasser in eastern Cairo, when they woke up one day to find themselves in the street, their humble homes destroyed. It was three years ago that a huge rock fall killed many of their number; unofficial estimates put the number of the dead at more than 500. El-Deweiqa district is one of the many slums in Egypt, where tens of millions of poor Egyptians live, as they cannot afford anything better. The tragedy in el-Deweiqa isn't the only one, but it's the most prominent in recent years. According to the Egyptian Government, there are over 1,200 slums in Egypt, 171 of them in Greater Cairo. The United Nations' housing agency UN-Habitat, defines slums as overcrowded areas with poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation and insecurity of tenure. In 1996, a conservative estimate reported that 34 per cent of Egypt's urban population was living in slums (ashwaiyyat). As for solving the crisis, human rights groups say that this can only happen if the Government helps. "Development organisations work with the Government and the local councils. The Government always wants to remove these slums without thinking of the people living there, while the development organisations think of these poor people and how to rehabilitate these slums," said Bassem Samir, a human rights activist. "Then there are the charitable organisations, which normally have religious affiliations. They offer direct services and aid, such as food, clothes and also medical services," he told the Egyptian Mail. Young people who are born in slums grow up in a world of terrible inequality. Children born into comfortably off families will be well fed, go to private schools and have access to private healthcare. They can look forward to a bright future, whether they're talented or not. If a child is born in one of Cairo's ashwaiyyat, his family is certain to be poor. He will probably be inadequately nourished as he grows up, already placing him at a huge disadvantage. Most likely, he will be forced to drop out of school (if he actually goes to one in the first place), to help supplement his family's income. "Human rights organisations mainly try to solve the problems starting at their roots, solving the reasons of any crisis first; it takes a long time for any problem to be solved completely," the activist added. "What we need now is for our society to be stabilised before we can solve any of our problems.” Now Mubarak and his institutions have gone, the people and civil societies are now waiting for parliamentary and local council elections before taking any further steps. Human rights and other organisations cannot solve the crisis of the slums on their own; the whole of the nation, led by the Government, must come up with a plan, according to Samir. Social policy today provides very little opportunity for young people who grow up in poverty to escape it. Thus, poverty continues to be transmitted from one generation to the next. The World Bank's poverty assessment report published in 2007 stated that, in 2005, 40 per cent of Egypt's population lived in poverty. The percentage has surely increased since then. Social policy in Egypt needs urgent and immediate revision. One crucial element of this policy must be to create equal opportunities for all young Egyptians. Governmental policies today do not provide this. "Civil society has taken many steps to solve the crisis of the slums in recent years, but these steps haven't been strong or effective enough," says Rami Raouf Hindi, a human rights activist in the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a non-governmental organisation founded in 2002, offers poor people legal support. It has another very vital role, recording and documenting human rights violations. "All civil society, especially human rights organisations, can do is to suggest to the Government policies for eliminating slums. “We've actually borrowed these suggestions from other, similar countries which have resolved their housing crises, but it is up to the Government to put these suggestions into practice, as we don't have the authority to do so. “We have a team of lawyers who represent these poor people in court without charge and we also give them medical care for free. We are also trying to change some laws to brighten up the slums," Hindi added.
