Improving Zaballeen Livelihoods in

Cairo's Garbage City

On the outskirts of Cairo lie six so called “garbage-cities”, areas in which informal garbage collectors (zaballeen) make their livelihoods by collecting, sorting and recycling the city's trash. Though these communities boast an enviable 90% waste re-use efficiency rate, it comes at a high price. These settlements are among the poorest in the world. Because most of the sorting and recycling is done by hand or with low-cost technologies and without appropriate safety equipment, the residents suffer high rates of health issues, including Hepatitis and Tetanus.

Children from these families often drop out of school because their families are too poor to pay for any school expenses. Due to poverty, children are forced to work to help support their families. They mostly work with garbage sorting and recycling, which is done in a very hazardous way, mostly by hand, without any protective equipment. Because they never learn how to read and write, these kids remain locked in a cycle of poverty, unable to attain better future for themselves.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a five-year grant to HANDS to help the efforts of our Egyptian partner organization, Spirit of Youth, to improve livelihoods of zaballeen communities in Cairo. The grant will finance several large activities, including the integration of informal waste collectors into the city waste collection system, supporting recycling activities by SMEs (small and micro enterprise) and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), including modernization and consolidation of recycling workshops, promoting city wide source-segregation of waste into organic and non-organic (the former of which will be directed to composting plants and the later of which will be taken for recycling); and other activities that at the same time provide economic opportunities for the informal garbage–collectors’ communities and further encourage environmentally friendly resource-preservation practices in Egypt.