Tora

APE has been working in the Tora region for 16 years now and the community development initiatives have been changing the local community. Today, most of the youth, girls and boys, attend schools and there is a literate group that needs to be encouraged to make the extra steps to break the barriers of generation induced poverty and social segregation due to illiteracy and poverty.

Garbage Collection and Separation
This project was tested in two urban neighborhoods in Cairo. Findings indicated that the scheme would afford replication, and would lead to more efficient recovery of solid waste from household garbage, as well as produce better composts free from contaminants and heavy metals. Women would no longer have to sort soiled garbage, and the health hazards to children would be greatly reduced.

APE's plans for the future are to expand garbage separation at the source in a pilot project for the entire city of Cairo. This project would require residents of Cairo to toss their household garbage into two components: food and non-food. This initial separation would make the manual sorting of household waste less hazardous to the health of women and children, and reduce the sorting time by half.
This initial separation would make the manual sorting of household waste less hazardous to the health of women and children, and reduce the sorting time by half. It would also produce cleaner organic manure and even higher grade compost. The non-food items would be recovered and sold to recycling entrepreneurs in the neighborhood and fetch a sustainable income. The environment would be further served from this recovery and re-manufacture of solid household waste which would become more efficient if residents sorted it into these two components.

The garbage collectors are descendants of subsistence farmers who started emigrating from Upper Egypt in the 1940s, searching for better economic opportunities. There were two waves of migration, the Wahiya who emigrated 100 years ago from the Western desert of Egypt, and the other poorer Zabbaleen who emigrated 50 years ago from Upper Egypt.

Many of them could not find shelter and settled on land owned by the government, and some even settled in cemeteries. They were evicted several times until they finally formed squatter settlements on the edge of the Cairo metropolis. Their last eviction was from Imbaba area in Cairo, from where they moved to Mokattam in the 1970s. In order to resume their economic activities after this move, and tracking the security of land tenure, they hastily built tin shacks to live in. Despite the constant threat of eviction and to earn a livelihood, the Zabbaleen rendered a vital and crucial service to the city of Cairo by collecting garbage in Cairo’s neighborhoods using donkey carts, and they soon established a highly organized system of informal collection routes.

Initially, the economic survival of the Zabbaleen was dependent primarily on food scraps hand-picked from the garbage they collected, pigs raised on the fodder that they bought from the Wahiya, and the sale of the material they sorted from the collected garbage. However, the visible poverty along with the multitude of environmental and health related problems associated with garbage collection has attracted a host of service agencies.

The Garbage Collectors after APE’s activities
APE has succeeded in the integration of community services with productive employment, the social with the economic, the traditional with the modern, so as to target women and men, the young and those of working age. In addition, it has involved formal business and its technical assistance so as to connect the informal with up-to-date technologies to link products with real markets and modify managerial skills into the simplest of micro-operations. APE has also enhanced the process of participation of the grassroots so as to ensure that their voices are employed in expressing their preferences, their ownership in immobilizing physical and human resources, and their welfare in distributing the burdens and rewards to the collective efforts. APE has indulged in the above three processes through the following:
·From organic garbage to compost gross sales, yearly half a million pounds on average.
·From young illiterate girls perched on garbage carts into young working staff and private small entrepreneurs that number 360 girl, some of them familiar with the computer and the internet.
·Relocating the garbage collected from the area around residences to the desert of Kattamia for the recycling of 90%.
·Training the second generation of garbage collectors to own a recycling machine and become small industrialists.

Handmade Production Unit

Mother and Child Center (Medical and Social Center)
This program revolves around upgrading midwives' skills and the immunization of pregnant women against tetanus. A health referral scheme refers residents to specific health care delivery institutions outside the settlement if the local resources in the community have been exhausted. A maternity center that receives infants and toddlers of working mothers was launched by a major donor from the private sector on March 21, 1996, Mother's Day in Egypt.

Social activities and camps to broaden their horizons and to expose the children of this closed community to the outside world are undertaken. Various trips to the pyramids, museums, and parks are arranged and attended by more than 250 children and students. Summer camps by the seaside also offer great opportunities for fun and learning for more than 200 children each year.

Awareness programs include:
The Adolescent Girls Program, which held campaigns that aimed at reducing the number of early marriages and handling the female circumcision issue.

The Hepatitis B Project, which aims to reduce the impact of hospital waste brought directly to the garbage collectors' households and separated by the women.

The Hepatitis C Treatment Project, which targets people carrying the virus in the 20-40 age group and provides them with the necessary treatment. The population under the age of 20 is currently only being tested, while the over 40's are tested and their treatment is provided by the Ministry of Health.

Prevention Programs include:
Save Newborn Babies Program, where efforts concentrated on finding the reasons for infant mortality and reducing the current rate in the area.

Hair Hygiene Program, which aims to communicate the importance of personal hygiene, focusing on hair care. This project enrolled a number of youths in intensive training so they could deliver information to the other residents.