“We are determined to complete all the phases of the Decent Life initiative despite the present difficult circumstances,” President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi said at the inauguration of the new Upper Egypt Train Station in Bashtil in Cairo in mid-October, reiterating the resolve to press forward with the large-scale poverty reduction and rural development programme known in Arabic as Haya Karima.
As the president has explained on previous occasions, the initiative was designed to be carried out in three phases, each covering 1,500 villages and 40,000 outlying hamlets and costing LE600 billion. The first phase took three years and ended up costing over LE400 billion, double the planned sum for this phase.
The second phase is expected to require a similar if not larger outlay. Nevertheless, now that the first phase is complete, work will begin on the second, “if not at the same pace, but we’re pressing forward,” the president added.
Launched on 2 January 2019, the Decent Life initiative aims to provide a decent life for the most vulnerable groups nationwide. Several months after the president launched the initiative, Decree 902/2019 established the Decent Life Foundation to serve as the umbrella body responsible for organising, monitoring, and following up on the work of the young volunteers involved in the initiative and for localising the realisation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
As explained on its website, the initiative also “aims to find effective interventions for one of the most important societal issues in Egypt, namely providing a minimum decent life for residents of the most needy communities in poor areas, unplanned urban informal areas, alternative areas to unsafe informal areas, and poor villages across the republic and thereby to eradicate extreme poverty.”
A package of projects is being carried out under the initiative’s umbrella focusing on diverse needs, such as healthcare by providing medical services, surgery, and prosthetic devices, job creation by promoting micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, housing and developing village infrastructure, and social services targeting the most vulnerable groups, including the elderly, persons with disabilities, and orphans.
“The initiative has met with remarkable success in improving living standards in rural Egypt and meeting the needs of the neediest groups. This inspired the idea to establish a foundation to follow up on the progress of the initiative’s projects and programmes and ensure their sustainability,” Buthaina Mustafa, official spokesperson for the Decent Life Foundation, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
The foundation is a “central body responsible for overseeing the execution of current programmes and the development of new ones,” she said.
The Decent Life initiative has encountered many challenges during its first five years. A recent study of it, a main means for achieving Egypt’s SDGs, listed five main problem areas that need to be addressed.
First is the needed finance, as the implementation of the initiative’s many projects and programmes is very costly amid the country’s current economic straits. Then comes management, as the various activities carried out under the initiative require close cooperation and coordination between several ministries and agencies.
The remoteness of many target villages and the lack of essential services also hamper the implementation of many projects.
The report highlighted that manifestations of instability and insecurity in some rural areas have also hampered implementation. The initiative has to deal with social challenges, as traditions and culture in some rural areas necessitate efforts to change cultural patterns and raise social awareness to enable the implementation of some projects, it said.
“We are working tirelessly to overcome these challenges through awareness-raising campaigns, empowering economically and socially marginalised groups, and enhancing cooperation with all relevant parties to marshal all the necessary resources. We are also engaging local expertise, which benefits us and strengthens citizenship and stability,” Mustafa said.
“Compassionate intervention” and “rapid long-term intervention” are perhaps the two most important keywords in the Decent Life Foundation’s strategy for achieving the initiative’s core mission of contributing to human development.
“Our priorities are to assist needy families with compassion, kindness, and professionalism,” the foundation says.
The strategy also calls for close collaboration among all the concerned parties, from ministries and government agencies and the private sector to civil society and the foundation’s 50,000-strong volunteer corps. The foundation has organised the volunteers into fieldwork teams tasked with monitoring project-recipient needs and arranging the appropriate interventions when necessary.
According to the Decent Life Foundation’s spokesperson, the fact that President Al-Sisi has personally sponsored the initiative was instrumental in getting it off the ground quickly, accelerating its work rate, and stimulating widespread positive interaction with it.
The Decent Life initiative has improved people’s lives in numerous villages. Some 18 million villagers have benefited from its multiple projects in infrastructure development, water and wastewater networks, and health and education services set into motion in the first phase, she added.
The programme of the second phase of the initiative has already been approved by parliament. With an estimated 21.4 million beneficiaries, it aims to develop 1,667 villages in 52 rural districts in 20 out of Egypt’s 27 governorates. According to the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development and International Cooperation, the targets of the first year of the second phase have been set and LE150 billion has been earmarked for the purpose in the 2024-2025 budget.
Seventy per cent of the allocations will be directed to water and sewerage projects.
The targets include the construction and development of 4,115 schools and 12,565 classrooms, 55 hospitals and 854 health units, and 493 emergency medical service points, the repair and upgrading of 336 irrigation bridges and the lining of 1,654 km of irrigation canals.
The Decent Life initiative includes “seven pillars” of work, including decent housing (improving the quality of housing inclusive of utility link-ups), infrastructure (establishing micro-enterprises and productive cooperatives), medical services (building, equipping and staffing hospitals and clinics), educational services (building, equipping and staffing schools and nurseries, and combatting illiteracy), economic empowerment (job creation through training opportunities in micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises and the establishment of industrial and craft complexes), social service interventions and human development, and environmental interventions (especially garbage collection and recycling).
The targeted groups are needy families in rural communities, seniors, persons with disabilities, female breadwinners and divorced women, orphans and children, unemployed youth, and volunteers.
Examples of projects implemented under the umbrella of the initiative are the Sabeel initiative, which distributes food parcels and hot meals, “Sweet Homes”, which trains female breadwinners in various baking techniques to equip them for employment or small businesses, and the “Yadoum Al-Farah” Programme (“may your happiness last forever”), which aims to help young couples prepare their future conjugal homes.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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