Decent Life … Largest development project in the world

The Decent Life initiative received great attention during the World Youth Forum in its fourth edition.

The forum is organized now in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and will last until January 13.

A large number of heads of state and government, public figures and representatives of international institutions and organizations attend the forum.

The preparatory activities of the forum included a workshop on January 8 about the Egyptian presidential Decent Life initiative.

Titled 'A decent life … The Egyptian Experience of Human Development', the workshop included information about how this presidential initiative is bringing about a decent life for 58 million citizens people around Egypt.

Launch

At the beginning of 2019, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called on state institutions and agencies to unite efforts to launch a national initiative at the state level to provide a decent life for the neediest social groups.

The initiative aims to provide a decent life for financially-incapable people and the neediest classes in the Egyptian countryside.

It will develop villages in the countryside and provide all facilities and services to people in these villages.

The work that is done in this regard goes under the umbrella of what is known as the Egyptian Rural Development Project.

Objectives

The initiative aims to alleviate the burdens of citizens in the neediest communities in the countryside and slums in urban areas.

It relies on the implementation of a set of services and development activities that would ensure a decent life for this category of the Egyptian population and improve their living conditions.

The targeted villages were divided according to data and surveys that were conducted by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics in coordination with the relevant ministries and authorities.

Stages

The villages with poverty rates of 70% or more include the villages most in need and need urgent interventions.

The first phase targets 377 villages most in need and most vulnerable to extremism and intellectual terrorism, in which the poverty rate ranges from 70% or more, with a total number of 756,000 families or 3 million people in 11 provinces governorates.

The second phase of the initiative will target villages with poverty rates from 50% to 70%. These are poor villages that need intervention, but are less difficult than the first group.

The third phase of the initiative will target villages with poverty rates less than 50 %. The poverty rate in these villages is not as acute as villages included in the villages included in the first and second phases of the initiative implementation.

Criteria

The initiative set criteria for selecting the neediest villages, the most prominent of which was the poor condition of basic services, including sewage and water networks, illiteracy, high density of school classes, poor health services, poor roads and high poverty.

Themes

The initiative relies on several axes to achieve a decent life for citizens.

The most prominent of these axes are the provision of decent housing, raising the efficiency of homes, building roofs, building housing complexes in the villages most in need, extending water, sanitation, gas and electricity connections inside homes, infrastructure for micro-projects and activating the role of productive cooperatives.

The medical services include building hospitals and health units, equipping them with equipment and operating them with medical cadres, as well as launching medical convoys and providing health services through them, such as prosthetic devices (headphones, glasses, wheelchairs and crutches), educational services for building and raising the efficiency of schools and nurseries, equipping them, providing educational staff, and establishing literacy classes, economic empowerment, training and employment through medium, small and micro projects, establishing industrial and craft complexes, providing job opportunities, conducting social and human development interventions that include human building and rehabilitation, targeting families, children, women, people of determination and the elderly, awareness initiatives, providing food baskets and subsidized distribution.

Testaments

International Monetary Fund

The presidential Decent Life initiative is one of the most important national projects in the Egyptian countryside, which aims to increase national income, achieve high growth rates, and support the industrial sector.

United Nations

The Decent Life initiative takes a comprehensive approach to address the economic, social and environmental dimensions, to improve the quality of life of poorest individuals, as the initiative is an unrepeatable opportunity to achieve the sustainable development goals.

UNICEF

The Decent Life initiative is a unique experience adopted by the Egyptian government. The initiative is the strongest program we have seen in our lives and it needs to be repeated in every country.

UNIDO

Decent Life is a strong and comprehensive initiative that works in all sustainable development frameworks to improve the quality of life in the Egyptian countryside. There is fruitful cooperation between the organization and the government sector to support villages for a decent life.