Posts Tagged ‘Aswat Masriya’
Looming poverty line: Struggle of Egyptians for a living, for a piece of bread
Posted on: March 5, 2017
Looming poverty line: Struggle of Egyptians for a living, for a piece of bread
SPECIAL COVERAGE | Looming poverty line: The struggle for bread
Looming poverty line: The struggle for bread
Aswat Masriya presents a special coverage on the struggle of Egyptians for a living in light of the country’s deteriorating economy.
– FEATURE | Family struggles reflect Egypt economic deterioration
– Expert: Govt mechanisms to tackle poverty not enough – INTERVIEW
– FEATURE l To feed my children or take the bus
– FACTBOX | Living costs and income of Egyptians in 2012-2013
This content is from : Aswat Masriya
As Egypt’s economy deteriorates: Female breadwinners struggle…
Women are the main breadwinners in as many as 30% of Egyptian households, a role frowned on by conservative Egyptian society, but increasingly important in a country plunged into dire economic straits by the turbulent politics of the post-Mubarak era.
Many of them are poor, illiterate and lacking experience of formal employment, and are forced into menial work in the informal economy, doing jobs that are poorly paid, with no insurance or pension and involving exposure to the public gaze that attracts the disapproval of neighbours.
Arwa Gaballa posted this Nov. 12, 2013 in Aswat Masriya:
A woman sells vegetables in downtown – Aswat Masriya
“Things were difficult before the uprising too, with those in power robbing us, but at least the little we had was enough to live on,” said Zeinab Abdel Fattah, 64. “Now we have nothing. Life has become unbearable.”
Abdel Fattah, who has a family of 8, leaves her home every morning at 6 a.m. for the city centre. Sitting cross-legged on a platform in the heart of Cairo, she sells eggs, eggplants and cottage cheese to passersby, but often returns empty-handed.
“No one buys anything anymore,” she said.
A Thomson Reuters Foundation poll of gender experts found Egypt to be the worst country in the Arab world to be a woman, due to endemic sexual harassment, a surge in trafficking, high rates of female genital mutilation and a rollback of freedoms since the revolution.
Egypt scored badly on work-related issues, too. Gender-based discrimination affects many women in the workplace and is rarely punished, respondents said.
While many Egyptian women have to work because their husbands died or divorced or abandoned them, others, like Abdel Fattah, support their family because their husband’s pension is small or his work is irregular or unstable.
“My husband was only a worker before he retired; he can’t read, you see. Now his pension is 500 Egyptian pounds ($72.57), which is not enough to feed us.”
Mona Ezzat of the New Woman Foundation, an advocacy group, said that while official data estimate 16 percent of Egyptian breadwinners are women, independent sources put the figure as high as 30 percent.
“Because the majority of these women are impoverished and thus are mostly illiterate and have no skills or experience, they resort to the informal economy, cleaning houses, street vending and so on,” she said.
The problem with working in the informal economy is that these women are not entitled to pensions or health or social insurance, and they are often exposed to physical and psychological violence that they cannot challenge, as they have no legal protection.
Even if Abdel Fattah’s thin grey hair weren’t showing beneath her worn-out headscarf, the wrinkles on her tired face, her missing teeth and rough, dirty hands were evidence of the difficult life she leads.
Like her husband, Abdel Fattah cannot read or write, but all her children can.
“My 6 children can read. Some of my children even went to university!” she said proudly with a big smile. “That was when things were easier, before they got this bad.”
The New Woman Foundation’s Ezzat said: “The struggles of breadwinners have worsened as Egypt’s economy deteriorated.” She added that there is no real plan for economic growth, as can be seen from the increase in the number of street vendors struggling to scrape a living.
The economy grew by 7% a year in the period leading to the popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in 2011 — part of the Arab Spring that swept North Africa — but has since slowed sharply because of the collapse of tourism and the fall in foreign investment.
GDP growth last year was only 2.1 percent, down from 2.2 percent in 2011, the state news agency reported earlier this month — worryingly low for a country whose population of 85 million suffers from high unemployment and is expected to reach 100 million by 2030.
Price rises have put many goods beyond the reach of average households, and this has led the government to draw up a plan to distribute basic supplies at subsidized prices.
SOCIAL PRESSURE
In Abdel Fattah’s case, her already grinding burden is made worse by her neighbours’ criticism of her for working at her age, “as if it was by choice”.
“They think there is a lot of money in what I do,” she laughed, adding that her neighbours mock her for having to work when she has six grown-up children.
Ezzat explains that the way female breadwinners are viewed and treated in Egypt is a psychological burden, especially as many of them live in poor areas which tend to be more conservative and more critical.
Female breadwinners are often criticised for spending too much time outside their home without a male figure around, a cultural judgment that is not limited to poor neighbourhoods, Ezzat said.
Neighbourly criticism and social pressure often force these women either to take their sons out of school and send them off to work in their place, or to marry off their daughters quickly to shift the responsibility for earning the family income to their husbands.
“The sons are deprived of getting an education and the daughters are married off before their time,” Ezzat said.
ANA HUNNA CAMPAIGN
Rights activists and women’s rights organizations in the Middle East posted their thoughts on female breadwinners in a Twitter campaign on Saturday.
Hundreds of activists around the Middle East joined the online debate, using the hashtags “#Loqmet3ish” and “#anahunna”. The first hashtag, Loqmet3ish, means “a piece of bread”, an Arabic phrase used widely to describe making a living.
The campaign, organized by Ana Hunna (I Am Here), said that women are the main supporters of 33% of Egyptian households and families.
“Despite the fact that norms (are) transforming in Egypt, women are still generally defined as dependants and subordinate to men,” Ana Hunna posted on its account.
Ana Hunna started out in 2011 as an online campaign to empower working women, but gradually expanded and now aspires to become an actual initiative, one of the organizers, Esraa Saleh, told Aswat Masriya.
The campaign used to depend on making films to raise awareness of the need for gender equality in employment, but it is now looking for more activities that could have a greater impact on the ground, Saleh said.
“If we (female breadwinners) decide to not work for just one week, this society will be paralyzed,” Rana Allam wrote on Twitter.
“It’s time we recognized Arab women; the real heroes of our generation,” said Hebbah Hussein, another participant in the campaign. “Mothers and breadwinners will shape Egypt’s future.”
Egypt casualties matching Iraq score this month?
The UN and international communities are trying hard to forget that Iraq still exist. The monthly casualties in Iraq due to daily dozen terrorist attacks on civilians have climbed to over 3,000.
Iraq, this once most highly literate State and the wealthiest among the “Arab” States has been reduced to suffer the ignominies of the most ignorant and Takfiri terrorist movements implanted by Saudi Arabia Wahhabi regime.
And Egypt restored ex-generals’ role in provinces before the latest mass bloody crackdown on the peaceful sit-in of the Moslem Brotherhood movement. The casualties are climbing quickly: Over 560 killed and 4,000 injured withing a day, and every day scores are being harvested since the bloody crackdown on peaceful demonstrators.
Tom Perry posted in Aswat Masriya (Egyptian Voices) this August 13, 2013
CAIRO, Aug 13 (Reuters) – Egypt’s interim president named at least 18 new provincial governors on Tuesday, half of them retired generals, in a shake-up that restored the influence of men from army and police backgrounds and flushed out Muslim Brotherhood members.
Deposed President Mohamed Mursi had appointed a number of civilians as provincial governors during his one year in office. Many of them were members of the Brotherhood. That marked a break with the Hosni Mubarak era, when the posts typically went to retired army and police officers.
The new appointees were sworn in by interim President Adli Mansour, head of the army-backed government which replaced the Mursi administration that was removed from power last month after mass protests against Brotherhood rule.
Minister of Defence and Military Production Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inspects an air defence formation on March 28, 2013 – photo from the Facebook page of the military spokesman
Critics said the line-up announced on Tuesday was a step backwards.
“It is Mubarak’s days,” prominent blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah wrote on his Twitter feed. “Down down with every Mubarak. Sisi is Mubarak,” he added, referring to General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the army chief who deposed Mursi.
Mursi’s final days in office were marked by controversy fuelled by his decision to appoint a member of the Gamaa Islamiya, a once-armed Islamist group, as governor of Luxor, where members of the movement killed 58 tourists in 1997.
Mursi’s appointment of Brotherhood members as provincial governors fuelled accusations that his movement was staging a power grab – a charge the Brotherhood always denied but which added fuel the uprising against his rule.
Strong Egypt party, a party led by former Brotherhood politician Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh, described the shake up as “a step towards the militarization of the state that copied the approach of the Brotherhood“, Al-Ahram reported, quoting its spokesman.
In a meeting at the presidential palace, Mansour told the governors their priority was to improve public services, “provide essential commodities at appropriate prices, and bring about security in the Egyptian street”.
Writing on his Facebook page, Mohamed Abu Hamed, a former MP, said it was “a very positive step” towards implementing the army-backed roadmap that envisions parliamentary elections within about five months. (Additional reporting by Omar Fahmyl; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
Adonis Diaries 