28 Million Egyptians Living in Slums by 2025?

Human Wrongs Watch By Baher Kamal*, Cairo, July 2014 – A couple of years ago, some Egyptian media hailed reports by the UN World Health Organisation and the UN Human Settlements Programme on slums, by saying that the United Nations considers Egyptian “cemetery-slums” or “grave slums” as the best ever of their kind in this country of 95 million inhabitants. A tomb retrofitted as a residence in the City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt. | Author: Rgoogin | GNU Free Documentation License | Under Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License | Wikimedia Commons But such statement was anything but accurate–in fact if Cairo’s large “cemetery-slum” , which is known as “City of the Dead”, could be somehow considered slightly better of than others, is just because it has been absorbed by the capital and therefore can in a way benefit from some of public facilities, such as water, power and public transport. Apart from not being accurate, what probably these media did not expect is that the number of the current 10 million slum dwellers is estimated to grow to up to 28 million, i.e. one of four Egyptians by 2015. A Full Ministry for Slums Only Nor they possibly expected that the current austerity government would rush to create a full ministry to deal only with the worsening living conditions of the slum dwellers. In fact, amidst harsh austerity measures –varying from sharply increasing fuel prices to raising public transport fees and imposing higher taxes– aimed to bridge the country’s huge deficit gap, the first government of president Abdel Fattah Al Sissi included a ministry dedicated exclusively to the slums. Just Some Facts The official figures before thee Slums Minister, Laila Iskandar, can be summarized as follows: – there are over 1,000 slums spreading along 20 Egyptian provinces, covering mostly farming lands, and inhabited by over 10 million dwellers, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics, – Cairo hosts the largest share of the also called “poverty belts”, and there is an urgent need to develop around 80 slums and remove another dozen of them mainly for security reasons, – 81 per cent of slum dwellers work in the informal sector, with 20 per cent of men unemployed, – 38 per cent of all households living in slums rely on some 200 Egyptian pounds (less than 30 US dollars) per month, – slums are estimated to increase in around 34 per cent in the coming decade, mainly due to population growth, the continued flow of internal migration, and the endemic lack of urban planning. “What Can We Do?… We Are Poor” “What can we do?



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