Egypt plans to allocate 1 billion Egyptian pounds from its annual state budget for the 2015/2016 fiscal year which started July 1, to develop urban slums, according to a statement from the Planning Ministry on Saturday.
In addition, 650 million Egyptian pounds will be allocated to develop some of Egypt's poorest villages, which make up 9.5 percent of the total number of impoverished rural areas in the country. The one billion pounds are only one part of the 6.85 billion Egyptian pounds targeting local development projects.
The Ministry of Urban Renewal and Informal Settlements, which was created in June 2014 to deal with Egypt's unplanned neighborhoods and urban maintenance, announced in January the launch of "Egypt Without Slums," a 3-year development project aiming to eradicate 258 urban slum areas.
The ministry said in May that it created the project with the cooperation of university students from across the country who would reportedly be trained in the summer to study and research slum areas close to their university campuses, so that the ministry could use those studies in implementing the development projects.
The ministry later announced in June that it was close to implementing the preliminary sample of the project expected to conclude in November, the development 44 slum areas in Cairo and Giza. The ministry said the sample will help in accurately determining the cost of entirely eradicating slums in Egypt.
Technical support manager at the Ministry of Urban Renewal and Informal Settlements Sherif El-Gohary previously said in statements that slums make up 40 percent of Egypt's urban areas.
Gohary added that the country had 364 slum areas and that it would require between 200 to 250 billion Egyptian pounds to completely eradicate these informal areas, an amount of money he said was beyond what the ministry is capable of acquiring.
Minister of Urban Development Laila Iskandar said at the Egypt Urban Forum last month that about 40 to 50 percent of Egyptians live in unplanned slum areas, adding that these areas, whether they are urban, rural or marginalized, lack basic services and facilities such as clean water, sewage and proper infrastructure.