Leading international human rights body, Amnesty International, said that Egypt has some 12 million people living in the slum areas, including about 850,000 people living in 404 areas that are considered by the Egyptian authorities as “unsafe.” It comes as the government claims to be implementing efforts to reduce poverty in the country.
The “unsafe” areas are defined as being threatened by rockslides, or “due to its construction with unsafe materials, or because it is located under high voltage power lines.”
The London-based rights group noted in a report that the Egyptian authorities made plans to deal with these “unsafe” areas without genuine consultation with municipalities, adding that the United Nations confirms that the continuation of “forced evictions” for these people would lead them to “extreme poverty.”
Salah Hassan, a resident of one of Cairo’s growing make-shift villages on the outskirts of the city, told Bikya Masr that life in these areas is “extremely difficult and angering.”
He said that he “used to be a working engineer, but when the government contract I was working on ended, I had nothing and didn’t receive my money and couldn’t pay for the house I was in so I had to leave. Because I had no where to go, I came here.”
Hassan argues that without government efforts to bolster and develop impoverished areas, these slums will continue to grow as more and more Egyptians struggle to find work.
“One of the problems facing Egypt is that many people believe the poor to be unskilled and lazy, but if you look around, there are a lot of people who have had well-paying jobs. Now, we just can’t do anything because there aren’t any opportunities,” Hassan added.
Amnesty said that human rights is the key development goal for the new millennium in Egypt, noting that the Egyptian government “must be committed, such as other members of the United Nations, to improving the lives of slum dwellers – which is one of the Millennium Development Goals for the new millennium, which began working on it since 2000 to address poverty in the world.”
The organization pointed out that after a decade of promising efforts, “the fate of these objectives in doubt,” pointing to the United Nations clear warning that these goals will “not be achieved in a timely manner, unless efforts are made to double in many of the participating countries.”
The rights group stressed that vulnerable and marginalized people in developing countries, “are vulnerable and often subjected to violations of their right to adequate housing, health, water, sanitation, education and are often ignored if they tried to raise their voices, calling on all governments to conduct an honest appraisal of progress and work to end discrimination and to promote equality and participation, and to give priority to the most disadvantaged groups.”