Why is there a water crisis in Egypt? Egyptian water activist Abdel-Mawla Ismail believes it is because water is considered a commodity, with the ability to generate a profit for those who own it, rather than a human right. Egypt depends upon the Nile for most of its freshwater, with rain and groundwater only providing a […]

What is happening in six villages in the central Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, puts paid to out-dated clichés about the Bedouin people being good at nothing but smuggling. Over the past year, the people of the villages of Wadi Amr, Karama, Um Shihan, Salahadin and Joura, left without water when the Egyptian government collapsed, have taken […]

Lake Mariout, which lies southwest of Alexandria, has long been a victim of pollution and mismanagement. For a century, waste has been pumped into its waters and its shallow waters have been claimed by tourism developments. The outlook for the lake has not brightened in the aftermath of the revolution – rather the destruction has […]

Long queues of locals by a big tanker of water, waiting to fill whatever vessels they can get their hands on, have become a familiar scene in Matrouh, Egypt’s second largest state. Part of this may well be due to a lack of security after the revolution; water transports, whether via pipe or otherwise, have […]

The evidence that some of the best agricultural land in the state of Qalyubia, bordering on Cairo city, is being polluted flows in, along the Battah Canal. The canal irrigates 30,000 acres of land and those lands, once renowned for the crops they produced and the farms they hosted, are slowly being ruined by industrialization. […]

An engineer. An expert in irrigation. The head of Water Resources at the African Development Bank. Awarded the Order of Republic, Second Class, in 1995. This is exactly the kind of Curriculum Vitae one could easily imagine among the papers on the desk of deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, if Mubarak had been about to […]

Despite the huge revenues garnered by the Suez Canal—more than $5 billion in 2011, according to the Suez Canal Authority, SCA—the surrounding communities have seen little of the profits. Unlike other countries, which have turned their waterways into development drivers, Egypt only collects tolls from passing ships and transfers them to the treasury. Despite the […]

There are common arguments in Egypt circulated by some and transmitted by others without scrutiny. One of these arguments says that the current alliance between the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood– no longer a secret–aims at preserving Israel’s interests and that the US received guarantees from the Muslim Brotherhood regarding this issue.  There are […]

Every repressive regime has relied on a team of paid goons to instill fear in its citizens. In Egypt, under Hosni Mubarak, these unofficial security forces were called Baltajia and they were particularly active during the Arab Spring uprisings in cracking down on demonstrators.  Every repressive regime has relied on a team of paid goons […]

Under an old tree, the heroine of the film Al Haram—which means taboo—dies while giving birth to a baby, conceived from being raped while she worked in the fields. What might the late director Henry Barakat say today if he saw the trucks at the entrances of Meet Swid Village, Dikirnes Center or Dakahliya Governorate? […]