The project aims to strengthening the economic security of
vulnerable communities in five mother villages and selected satellite villages
in Minya through creation of more and better employment opportunities and
increased employability of the local labor force, while contributing to
mitigate threats to environmental, personal, community and food security.
The need for pro-poor economic growth and better targeting of development programs in Upper Egypt is well documented in the last Human Development Reports, as well as in Egypt's 2006 poverty map and its update in 2009. Upper Egypt is inhabited by 40% of the national population, and by 66% of Egypt's extreme poor, making it the most vulnerable region in the country. With a poverty incidence of 41.2%, Upper Egypt is almost doubling the national average of 21.6%.
Minya was selected as the target governorate in consultation with the Government of Egypt because it displays high levels of persistent poverty, as well as the second lowest HDI ranking amongst governorates. It is the most populated in Upper Egypt, with approximately 4.6 million inhabitants, 82% of which live in rural areas. There are over 3,000 villages in the governorate, comprising more than 30% of the poorest villages of Upper Egypt. A number of assessments recently conducted under UN programs show high levels of unemployment and underemployment in Minya, especially in rural areas and among youth and women. The post-revolution economic downturn has triggered a rise in crime rates, food insecurity, child labor and added pressure on existing infrastructure and services as well as on local natural resources. Inter-linkages and dynamics among human security threats observed in Minya are described below.To work towards this purpose, UN-Habitat will work in partnership with other UN agencies ( UN RC, UNIDO, UN Women, ILO, IOM,) involved in the project to create and build the capacity of community and youth groups to play an active role in identifying community needs, formulating action plans, designing implementation strategies and fundraising from local partners. The project will coordinate with governmental authorities ( MoLD and Governorate of Minya) to ensure the mainstreaming of community engagement in planning and resource allocation.
Economic security of vulnerable communities will be achieved through creation of a participatory plat form, human security forum, that will be a tool to identify real community needs and prepare community action plans with regards to achieving human economic security. UN-Habitat will adopt an urban upgrading approach to achieve this purpose, through neighborhood upgrading initiatives and other initiatives related to urban upgrading and governance.
As a direct intervention, the project will implement upgrading projects which will serve beneficiaries to be more economically active and self- sufficient. To achieve this target, Human Security Forum will be created and activated on both village level and district level, the HS forum will include the active community leaders and members from different sectors like youth, women and community focal points adding to governmental officials and NGOs. The project will build the capacity of Human Security Forum to identify the community needs, form an action plan and to be able to raise resources for the implementation of the projects. An integrated capacity building program will be conducted to enable the HS fora to play its designed role. Training will be conducted by different project partners according to their mandates to provide the HS fora with skills to identify the community needs, creating dialogue with the government to meet the needs, conduct fund raising activities for sustainability and acting as a communication channel between the local community and local authorities.
In order to sustain the interventions , the project will work to mainstream the the HS forum through up -scaling the concept to the governorate level, a linkage between the district level HS forum and the governorate of Minya to assure that the needs of the local communities are reflected in the upper level planning process. The HS forum will act as a bottom -up mechanism for planning and resource allocation
