Human Wrongs Watch
By Baher Kamal*, Cairo, July 2014 – A couple of years ago, some Egyptian media hailed reports by the UN World Health Organisation and the UN Human Settlements Programme on slums, by saying that the United Nations considers Egyptian “cemetery-slums” or “grave slums” as the best ever of their kind in this country of 95 million inhabitants.
A tomb retrofitted as a residence in the City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt. | Author: Rgoogin | GNU Free Documentation License | Under Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License | Wikimedia Commons
But such statement was anything but accurate–in fact if Cairo’s large “cemetery-slum” , which is known as “City of the Dead”, could be somehow considered slightly better of than others, is just because it has been absorbed by the capital and therefore can in a way benefit from some of public facilities, such as water, power and public transport.
Apart from not being accurate, what probably these media did not expect is that the number of the current 10 million slum dwellers is estimated to grow to up to 28 million, i.e. one of four Egyptians by 2015.
