Egypt offers temporary housing for slum dwellers

Cairo: After years of living in a slum area in a Cairo suburb, Najla Mohammad, a mother of six, is elated.

She now has an apartment for her family in a well-equipped residential community as part of an ambitious government plan to provide quality housing to the country’s slum dwellers.

“I didn’t expect that my dream would come true and get an apartment in such an area as Al Asamarat,” Najla, whose husband died six years ago, says. She is referring to a housing project located in the south-eastern Cairo neighbourhood of Moqattam which President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi opened last month.

The first two stages of the project comprises 11,000 apartments along with amenities constructed at a cost of 1.58 billion Egyptian pounds (around Dh65 million). A third phase is already under way to build more than 7,000 apartments at an estimated cost of 950 million pounds.

All the housing units are allocated for dwellers of informal housing districts in the Egyptian capital.

Al Sissi, who took office in 2014, has made providing quality housing to the nation’s poor a priority for his government.

“Everyone has to support the president in his efforts to make Egypt better,” Najla, an employee at a private sector company, says.

“He has kept his promises for the poor. Long live Egypt,” she adds, chanting a signature slogan often articulated by Al Sissi on public occasions.

The first two phases of Al Asmarat scheme were completed in one year. The third and final stage is expected to be finalised by the end of this year.

The project has green areas, recreational facilities, schools and medical centres.

“It is an integrated project whose level is not less than the level of the wealthy people’s compounds we see on television,” says Mokhtar Hamed whose family has recently got an apartment there.

“I had never thought that I would one day live in a place like this with all these services and clean drinking water,” the 63-year-old man adds. Hamed spent most of his life in Duwaiqa, a Cairo slum area where around 100 people were killed in a rockslide in 2008. The tragedy drew attention to slum dwellers’ plight.

There are around 1,221 informal housing districts populated by more than 15 million people across Egypt, according to unofficial figures.

Al Sissi has pledged to redevelop such areas in two years.

“When we have among us people who are not living comfortably or safely, we should not stand hand-cuffed,” he said in a televised address last month. “We will eliminate the problem of slums in two years.”

He urged inhabitants to move to temporary housing provided by the state authorities until their districts are rebuilt.

The government estimates that redeveloping the country’s informal housing areas will cost around 14 billion pounds. Egypt is grappling with economic woes including a sharp decline in revenues from tourism, which is a main source of national income, due to the unrest that gripped the country in the wake of the 2011 uprising.

Al Sissi is determined to make slums a matter of the past, though.

“When I saw images of these areas, it was painful,” he said. “We cannot allow this situation to continue even if we have to share a morsel of bread among us so that none of our people keep living in such circumstances.”