Bayada Mohamed has left her old slum on a crumbling cliffside and moved into a new flat in a Cairo residential complex, making her among the first to benefit from a government plan to rehouse residents of Egypt’s most dangerous slums.
Like other residents of the Doueyka slum where homes have no running water and a rockslide killed about 130 people in 2008, Ms Mohamed’s family has been offered a rental flat in the recently-opened Tahiya Misr development in the Moqattam area.
“Where was I and where am I now?” she said, sitting in her new flat surrounded by new furniture.
There are 351 slums deemed unsafe in Egypt, most of them in the sprawling capital where the poorest have built ramshackle homes that lack basic amenities such as mains sewage and water. Some 850,000 people are believed to live in dangerous slums.
Building collapses are common in Cairo, home to some 20 million people, and the shortage of afforable housing is so acute that 1.5 to 2 million are believed to live in tombs in an area known as the City of the Dead.
The Egyptian president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi promised last month to move all those living in unsafe slums to new flats over the next three years in an ambitious project expected to cost about 14 billion Egyptian pounds (Dh5.8bn).
The first two phases of Tahya Misr, which is dedicated to rehousing slumdwellers, were completed in 11 months and comprise 12,000 flats. The third phase opens in 2017, bringing the number of flats to 20,000. The completed complex will house 100,000.
Government efforts to eradicate the worst slums come as Mr Sisi faces growing pressure to revive the economy and avoid the kind of protests that toppled two presidents in the past five years.
But rising prices are eroding living standards in a country where tens of millions rely on state-subsidised food and complicating efforts to rid Egypt of its slums.
Not all slum residents have been as enthusiastic as Ms Mohamed about leaving behind their communities and seeing their old homes demolished.
“Most of the residents of these areas wish to be in areas close to where they are actually living now and this for us is a problem,” Mr Sisi said at the recent opening of a low-income housing project in the Madinat Badr area of Cairo.
While it evacuates dangerous areas, the government is upgrading other informal settlements, connecting them to basic services and paving roads.
But many residents are disappointed with the upgrades.
Magdi Mahmoud, a factory worker who lives with his family in the informal settlement of Abu Dahruj in southern Cairo, said the work should have stretched to schools and clinics.
“The improvements are not bad but the important thing is people look after them,” he said.
And on Cairo’s dusty and desolate fringes, the city’s poorest are building more illegal homes on land they do not own.
As the Tahya Misr development nears completion, Ahmed, a vegetable seller, is working with neighbours to complete a new slum near Arab al Barawi, an older informal settlement in southern Cairo, after struggling to afford the rent there.
His new house is built with scavenged materials.
“Thank God, today he blessed us with a bit of wood that was left on the street … to roof my house,” Ahmed said.
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What is graphene?
Graphene is extracted from graphite and is made up of pure carbon.
It is 200 times more resistant than steel and five times lighter than aluminum.
It conducts electricity better than any other material at room temperature.
It is thought that graphene could boost the useful life of batteries by 10 per cent.
Graphene can also detect cancer cells in the early stages of the disease.
The material was first discovered when Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were 'playing' with graphite at the University of Manchester in 2004.
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Five famous companies founded by teens
There are numerous success stories of teen businesses that were created in college dorm rooms and other modest circumstances. Below are some of the most recognisable names in the industry:
- Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg and his friends started Facebook when he was a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate.
- Dell: When Michael Dell was an undergraduate student at Texas University in 1984, he started upgrading computers for profit. He starting working full-time on his business when he was 19. Eventually, his company became the Dell Computer Corporation and then Dell Inc.
- Subway: Fred DeLuca opened the first Subway restaurant when he was 17. In 1965, Mr DeLuca needed extra money for college, so he decided to open his own business. Peter Buck, a family friend, lent him $1,000 and together, they opened Pete’s Super Submarines. A few years later, the company was rebranded and called Subway.
- Mashable: In 2005, Pete Cashmore created Mashable in Scotland when he was a teenager. The site was then a technology blog. Over the next few decades, Mr Cashmore has turned Mashable into a global media company.
- Oculus VR: Palmer Luckey founded Oculus VR in June 2012, when he was 19. In August that year, Oculus launched its Kickstarter campaign and raised more than $1 million in three days. Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion two years later.
Company Profile
Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
Headquarters: Egypt
UAE base: Hub71, Abu Dhabi
Current number of staff: More than 150
Funds raised: $22 million
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