1211 Informal Settlements in Egypt Needed Upgrading – Minister

There are 1211 nation-wide informal areas in Egypt, therefore, the current government is working on an upgrading plan to start with the most unsafe areas, the Egyptian Housing minister said on Tuesday.

Minister of Housing Eng. Ibrahim Mehleb stated that the current scheme focus on developing the most unsafe informal settlements in Egypt, which locate over the slopes of mountains alongside areas nearby the electrical cables

In his keynote speech at Cityscape Egypt Business Breakfast held on Tuesday, minister Mehleb revealed a cooperation protocol signed with the Ministry of Social Solidarity and an Egyptian non-governmental grant-making foundation, Sawiris Foundation for Social Development. The recently signed protocol aims to upgrade and redevelop utilities for the slums.

Cityscape Egypt, one of the leading real estate exhibitions in the Middle East and the world, discussed during the business breakfast on Tuesday ways for supporting the Egyptian real estate industry at the Cityscape Egypt Business Breakfast in the presence of Minister Saleh on behalf of Egyptian Prime Minister, Dr. Hazem Al Biblawy and Eng. Ibrahim Mehleb, Egyptian Minister of Housing, Utilities and Urban Development.

According to recent studies made by German Agency for International Co-operation (Deutsche Gessellschaft fur Internationale Zusammernarbeit) or  GIZ, 11 million citizens are living in informal areas in Egypt and are lacking the suitable services and suffering unemployment.

Informal areas are a global phenomenon that have amplified on a long term and increased dramatically especially in the global south cities. In Egypt, informal areas emerged in the 1960s and inflated enormously in their distribution inside and around the urban mass. Greater Cairo, as one of the metropolitan cities, with around 17 million inhabitants, contains a vast number of informal areas of more than 40% of the GCR urban mass.

The increase of the rural migration to the centralized Cairo, and the saturation and limitation of the formal housing contributed greatly to such phenomenon. Residents of informal areas, in Egypt, suffer from the lake in the basic urban services (among other; clean water supply, electricity and sewage).