2 - 8 May 2002
Issue No.584
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 May 2002 Issue No.584 |
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'A plan for the people'
In the Egyptian countryside, a novel approach aims to improve the lives of the nation's most destitute. It also reveals much about how well the Egyptian government and its foreign partners work together. Jasper Thornton writes
Cairo is a great city. Its frets and fevers make headline news around the world. So it is no wonder we sometimes forget that an Egypt exists outside the metropolis; that the generations still tread outside the sodium lights of Umm Il-Dunya; and that there is more to Upper Egypt, for example, than train disasters, sectarian anger and Islamists crouched in fields of cane.
But if we do turn to look, peering perhaps through a rent in our neglect torn by one of those crises, we see one constant running through rural life: poverty.
Sohag's wretched earn less, live shorter lives and have less schooling than any other people in Egypt. USAID is largely absent, and economic progress is painfully plodding. Developing Sohag and its environs has become a matter of urgency for Governor Ahmed Abdel-Aziz Bakr, the Ministry of Environmental Affairs, and international donors, such as Britain's Department for International Development (DFID). They, and other stakeholders, have devised a Governorate Environment Action Plan (GEAP) to tackle Sohag's crushing troubles.
"Environment" here is meant holistically, encompassing the full range of assets and resources available to a people to make their lives richer, healthier and gentler. The "risks of environmental degradation," are anything but hippy hand-wringing and new-age ennui; they are, the authors of Sohag's GEAP write, social unrest, weaker farming, industrial inefficiency and plummeting tourism. They add, "In today's world, environmental improvements are an integral part of economic growth." A glimpse at the plan and its workings can also shed light on the sometimes tetchy relations between the Egyptian government and its international partners. Marrying their disparate aims is never easy; but it is that relationship that is shaping Egypt's future.
The troubles of Sohag governorate are legion. The people live on half the money that Cairenes do -- earning, on average, just $480 a year.* Over a third of its people cannot read or write. In 1995, three people in every 10 had no water at home. Some had no homes at all. Almost one new-born child in every 10 dies; those that survive infancy die sooner than those born anywhere else. Poor health, pollution and squabbles over land are endemic; suffering goes unremarked.
In reply, Sohag's GEAP aims to provide and manage "efficient infrastructure and environmental services" and provide "the planning, sustainable development and management of the natural (land, water, air and cultural) resources of the governorate." The GEAP plugs into the Strategic Development Plan for Sohag, which addresses the need for "jobs, income and progress."
The team mandated to follow through on the GEAP recommendations is part of a project known as "Support for Environmental Assessment and Management" or SEAM. SEAM is run by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) and a UK NGO, and is supported by Britain's DFID. SEAM's action team consists of 24 Egyptian specialists, two international consultants, and representatives from the governorate and the EEAA.
Phil Jago, manager of the SEAM project, explained to Al-Ahram Weekly that for any initiative in Sohag to work, all the "community" have to be involved. In 1994, the SEAM team set about working out who the stakeholders were and ranking them according to their "influence." "Key stakeholders" (who, in practice, it seems, were those with the power to stop projects), were treated to one-on-one meetings. The views of "official stakeholders" were also canvassed: Egypt's Social Fund for Development, the governor, district officials and the heads of 15 governorate departments.
Open workshops were held for members of the public to have their say on SEAM's plans. Next came focus groups, convened to work out how best to ramp up participation. "Business people, students, housewives, we asked them all," explained Jago.
One of SEAM's first initiatives was to help poor people get rid of waste quicker and more cheaply. The team interviewed seven per cent of households to find out if they would pay for a waste management scheme and analysed whether the project would work if the ultra-poor paid less. After that, SEAM handed out information door-to-door in cartoon form to help those unable to read. The SEAM team needed to know if locals were willing to pay for the waste management project so it could carry on after the team left.
"Sustainability is key," says Jago, "USAID, for example, in Mansoura sold huge waste incinerators to the governorate. They were too expensive to maintain, and ended up being sold as scrap. We needed to know our improvements will last."
The team's consultations revealed that 70 per cent of Sohag's inhabitants were willing to pay for their better waste management, on a means-tested basis.
Other of SEAM's plans stretch from waste management, improving drinking water, treating drainwater, protecting crops and using agro-chemicals. The economic benefits of these improvements are abundant. The EEAA estimates that LE2 million a year can be spared by having fewer sick people needing care and taking days off work.
The progress of the waste-management scheme shows how the judicious application of funding can make lives substantially better, at minimal cost. In Sohag, waste was originally hauled to a dump-site in the desert. The 19-kilometre round trip meant only one load a day. The streets piled high with refuse and children were often seen playing in water fouled by excrement. The SEAM team used donor money to build a way-station nearer the city; the dump track ferried rubbish there and, the station being nearer, managed three trips a day. The rubbish at the way-station was later packed and driven to the waste site in the desert. Sohag's rubbish hauling capacity was increased three-fold.
Flowing from this initiative, other improvements helped local industry. The rubbish trucks that Sohag governorate used were poor copies of international brands.
"They just looked at catalogues, but they used all the wrong materials," said Jago. The SEAM team, explained Colin Clarke, head of the DFID mission in Egypt, "transferred knowledge of the appropriate materials to use when engineering the equipment. Those brands, properly made, now exist in Egypt. Before that technology transfer, 20 out of every 50 rubbish trailers broke. Now they are being exported!" Clarke explained that "unlike some other aid projects, we have no statutory obligation to transfer technology from any one country. We often transfer technology from the developing world to the developing world, for example. We have flown in engineers from India."
Key to making the GEAP work has been cooperation between the Egyptian government and its international partners. Consultation has been wide from the start, and has included -- though not only -- government figures all the way up to ministers. It has not all been plain sailing.
"Governorate officials found the whole thing weird, at first," Jago told theWeekly. "They pointed out to us that they had experts in the universities to tell them whether these things are a good idea or not and didn't see the point of us asking people and launching awareness campaigns."
After four years of work, though, they were won round, and the governorate plan, which the governor of Sohag and the then-minister of the environment, Nadia Makram Ebeid, both endorsed, stipulates institution building across the face of the Egyptian state to make future management and monitoring of plans simpler. The plan does not envisage changing Egypt's bureaucratic structure; but it does imagine new officials at existing governorate levels, with new responsibilities and awareness, answering to a new "General Office for the Environment." This does, of course, bear on the weighting of state responsibility: more local officials should lead to greater decentralisation. Whether this can be done will be a true test of relations between the government of Egypt and its partners from abroad.
SEAM's approach has become a model other donors told the Weekly they are glad to emulate. They cite its focus on simple low-cost, high sustainability targets, its choice of projects, and its attempts to make the benefits obvious to its main customers, the poor. But there are other features peculiar to SEAM that have helped it race forward. The team can source people, know-how and equipment from anywhere; this has freed it to fit solutions to problems, not problems to solutions. But perhaps most important, consultation has been broad, stretching from the Egyptian state to the Egyptian people. As the authors of the plan for Sohag say, "this plan belongs to the people." And that is a novelty that may stir even the most cosmopolitan of consciences to look again at the dusty fields and bitter lives that lie just beyond the horizons of the city.
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