CAIRO: According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 2008 is the first year in history that will see the majority of the world’s population living in cities.
A picture of camel riders in the desert, advancing towards the sprawling Cairo metropolis graced the glossy guidebook-like cover of 2007 report.
One major element of the UNFPA report was a specific focus on women, and was one reason why Egypt was featured on the cover, Mona El-Ghazaly, national program officer at the UNFPA in Egypt, told The Daily Star Egypt.
The report discussed health services, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, including AIDS/HIV, and gender violence. The latter was discussed specifically in Egypt.
As part of a series on youth within urban areas, there was a story and interview within an Egyptian woman named Reham. She spoke about her experience of sexual harrasement on the street, as well as a near death experience she had in a toktok crash, that turned her more towards Islam and wearing the head scarf.
Another article, entitled “In the Slums of Cairo, Home is a Roof Over Your Head, discussed problems facing residents of Ezbet El Gaggana. The article called on the Cairo to “address the urgent needs of the growing numbers of urban poor.
A major concern of the report was the urban poor, as one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals is to cut extreme poverty in half, a battle that UNFPA Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid said, “will be waged in the world’s slums.
The Egypt article described the constant leakage of sewage water, fumes of burning garbage, and the presence of 3,000 – 4,000 houses without roofs within the slum, as well as the lack of an effective political way for slum dwellers to find solutions to these problems.
According to the article, more than “80 percent of the households do not have any running water . This slum is one of 1,221 “informal areas in Egypt that house between 12-15 million of the country’s 74 million people.
According the statistics released by the annual UNFPA report for 2007, 98 percent of Egyptians have access to “improved drinking water sources. When asked about the apparent contradiction between the data, El-Ghazaly declined to comment. The statistics for the annual report come from the Egyptian Government ministries, said several sources at the UNFPA.
Egypt ranked well regionally and globally in terms of terms of life expectancy and living conditions: less than 5 percent of the population earns less than $1 a day. But the country ranked quite low both regionally and globally, in terms of women’s representation in parliament.
While elements of the report focused on Egypt, it largely addressed global trends associated with rapid urbanization.
According to the report, the number of urban dwellers is expected to nearly double to 5 billion by 2030. This will lead to enormous changes, which according to Obaid, “are too large and too fast to allow planners and policymakers to simply react . Cities need to prepare now for the coming growth.
Urbanization also holds potential, said the report, as “no country in the industrial age has ever achieved significant economic growth without urbanization. Cities concentrate poverty, but they also represent poor people’s best hope of escaping it.
