CAIRO: The Society of Writers on Environment and Development in Egypt granted the award of Man of the Year for Environment and Development to physics professor Dr Salah Arafa.
He was chosen for his pioneering work with solar energy and recycling in rural Egypt and his overall contribution to sustainable development, the Society’s Secretary General, Susan Zaki, said.
The Society was established 13 years ago by journalist Salama Ahmed Salama to promote environmental work and awareness in Egypt.
Arafa is a faculty member of the department of physics at the American University in Cairo. For more than 30 years he has been working on environmental sustainable development.
“There is a need for concentrated effort on two fronts: on the thousands of poor villages that produce our food and on the concentration of our population of 80 million in 5 percent of our territory, said Arafa.
His work in this field started in Basaisa, a small rural settlement in the Sharqeya governorate. Arafa’s idea was to transform the poverty- and illiteracy-stricken village by using what the local population already had: a community, agriculture and human capital. Through training and different projects, the village became a model for rural sustainable development.
“When I went to the village 35 years ago I found three things: very kind people, famine, and garbage, Arafa told Daily News Egypt.
He started working with the villagers to train them in solving their own problems by themselves. To take care of the garbage, the village used bio-gas technology: organic waste was collected and then burned to produce gas for household energy and high-quality fertilizers. To increase agricultural and household production, Arafa worked with the local population on time management and efficiency of production methods. Workshops were set up to train people in different trades: knitting, sewing, metal working, etc.
To ensure sustainability of the village progress, the local community set up two organizations: a community development organization and a production cooperative.
Today, Basaisa has become the emblem of rural sustainable development and a model followed in Egypt and abroad. The Egyptian government has tried using the model in an initiative called “Shorouk in which 1,000 villages were selected to implement sustainable development projects.
Arafa praised the efforts of the government, but said that care should be taken to ensure true sustainability. “Sustainable development is not to send an engineer to a village. It is to make an engineer out of the villager.
In Arafa’s opinion, Egypt needs education of the public. “We need public education, but not in the way we usually do it here in Egypt – by collecting the elite in big hotels. He stressed the importance of reaching out to the general public, to people who do not have ready access to new ideas and technology.
“We have to do it now, so that it is not too late, Arafa concluded.
