Scraping a living in the City of the Dead

Umm Mohammed walks slowly down the dusty alleys of Cairo’s largest graveyard, known locally as the “City of the Dead”. She isn’t here to pay her respects to the deceased. She actually lives in one of these elaborate tombs built for the Egyptian upper class centuries ago. "My husband and I migrated a long time ago from Upper Egypt looking for work and we ended up here," Umm Mohamed said. She and her family are not the only ones to inhabit the shelters built to house coffins above ground in this vast cemetery. And millions more like them inhabit the sprawling slums that encircle Cairo. Over the past 30 years, a steady stream of poor and often illiterate migrants has abandoned the dirt poor villages of the Nile Valley in southern Egypt heading for Cairo and other cities in the wealthier and industrialised north. Unable to afford proper housing, they have made their home wherever they can. According to the UN 2005 Egypt Common Country Assessment (CCA), 16.7 percent of Egypt’s population was living below the poverty line in 2000. The country has an estimated population of 77.5 million, so if the UN estimates are right, about 13 million Egyptians are still condemned to live in inhuman conditions. The biggest problem is a lack of jobs. Unemployment in Egypt is officially put at 9.9 percent of the labour force, but most local economists reckon the real jobless rate is double that. Whatever the real number, President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for the past 24 years, is all too keenly aware of the problem. One of Mubarak’s constantly reiterated campaign pledges ahead of last month’s presidential election was a promise to create 4.5 million new jobs during his new six-year term. On paper at least, poverty rates have been falling in Egypt since the mid-1990s as economic growth has picked up. The country now boast a per capita national income of US $1,390 – three times the average of sub-Saharan Africa. But economists say the new wealth created has not been equally shared, so the problem persists. Disparities with rural areas "Even though Egypt's economy is improving, we still have disparities in the distribution of wealth across the nation," said Ghada Waly, the deputy head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Egypt. "This disparity is mainly between Upper Egypt and the north,” she stressed. According to Waly, the relatively affluent Nile delta in the highly urbanised north of Egypt, has been much more successful in attracting development and benefiting from it than the remote and still largely rural south of the country. “[Poverty] has become a predominantly Upper Egypt phenomenon, with poverty deepening in both rural and urban areas in Upper Egypt governorates," she said. The drift to the cities began in the 1970’s, with most rural migrants making for the capital Cairo. The city now has an estimated population of 12 to 15 million and vies with Lagos in Nigeria for the title of the largest city in Africa. Ineffective action But many of the incomers to Cairo fail to find a proper job. They end up, like Umm Mohamed and her family, surviving on a pittance in the informal sector of the economy. Despite the intense summer heat, Thanaa Hussein tends a small fire fed by old newspapers and straw grilling corncobs for sale to passers by. Next to her, her oldest daughter counts the day’s earnings and tries to attract customers. "I don’t know of any other job apart this one," Thanaa said, adding that selling snacks in the street was the only way she can feed her three children. Thanaa lives and works in one of the slum areas on the outskirts of Giza, Cairo’s twin city on the west bank of the river Nile A bridge away lies one of Cairo's high income areas featuring the latest luxury cars and shops selling designer clothes. But people like Umm Mohamed and her husband in the 'City of the Dead' and Thanaa selling roasted sweet corn on the streets of a slum squeeze by as little as 50 Egyptian Pounds (US $8.50) per month. "There are resources in this country, however they are not used effectively to cover the whole nation," said Ahmed al-Naggar, editor-in-chief of Strategic Economic Directions, a journal published by the al-Ahram's Centre for Political and Strategic Studies. "The problem lies in poor distribution and injustice," he added. "Egypt has adopted a free economy but it is still a developing one." “The government’s economic supremos are only concerned with helping businessmen as they shape policy, but they lack a sense of social responsibility,” al-Naggar said. The economist maintains that the real purchasing power of most Egyptians has actually fallen in recent years, despite a rise in nominal wages and that this phenomenon even affects the middle class. According to a study prepared recently by al-Naggar’s journal, the general manager of a state-run enterprise used to earn 28.50 Egyptian pounds per month in 1977. That was worth around US $17 at the time. "With this income he could buy 28.5 kg of meat," al-Naggar said. "Now he earns 540 Egyptian pounds (around US $100) and can only buy around 15 kg of meat. This just gives a brief glimpse of how far real incomes have fallen in Egypt." Searching for solutions Although Egypt boasts a whole range of modern and highly developed industries, the country only ranked 119 out of 177 nations listed in the UN Human Development Index for 2004. Heba Handoussa, one of Egypt’s most prominent economists, helped to compile that report on global living standards. "One of the main reasons for Egypt's low position in the Human Development Index is that the poor are not integrated in the development process in Egypt," she told a conference at the American University in Cairo (AUC) conference earlier this year. Al-Naggar believes that more government money should be spent on helping the poor. "Public expenditure is currently dedicated to the upper class. We need public expenditure to be devoted to the lower classes," he explained. Waly at UNDP agreed. She called for a sharp increase in spending on health and education, aimed specifically at those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. "Mechanisms for eradicating poverty should include direct assistance to the poor through a stable safety net, which should include an improvement of the health sector and the eradication of illiteracy," she said. She also urged the government to help mop up unemployment by doing more to assist the development of small businesses. All of UNDP’s projects in Egypt are aimed at reducing poverty, Waly noted. One price for all One of these schemes is a one-price vegetable market which has been established in a low income suburb of Giza. It sells tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines, green peppers and other common local vegetables at the same price per kg and at a considerable discount to normal market prices. This cooperative market, which cuts out the middle man, is designed to help people like Umm Mohamed, the cemetery dweller, enjoy a healthier and more varied diet. "We can only afford to buy vegetables occasionally and we only eat meat at religious festivals when people distribute it on the poor," said Umm, whose family relies most days on a simple dish of lentils. The one-price vegetable market aims to help low-income families save 15 to 20 percent on their weekly shopping bill. "We not only purchase the vegetables from the producers, we also administer the money and study market prices,” said one of the eight young Egyptians trained by UN experts to run the cooperative. “The aim of this is for us to become independent once we are ready.” The project was inspired by successful cooperative markets in Venezuela that have been widely imitated in other Latin American countries over the past 20 years. If the pilot in Giza proves successful, similar one-price markets will be rolled out elsewhere in Egypt. However, while such initiatives may help alleviate poverty, economists say cut-price food markets will not solve the problem for people who cannot earn a decent living in the first place.