Salah Arafa

Salah Arafa pioneered the concept of community based participatory development in Egypt. With a focus on both rural squatter communities and on emerging desert communities (the future of Egypt), Salah’s Basaysa model combines local resources with rural civic engagement to promote social advancement and modernization while preventing the rural outflux from the villages to urban areas. Since the late 1980s, the Basaysa Village concept has been taught in schools and civil sector training courses as a model of rural development to be replicated.

Salah’s idea involves using natural local resources with active citizen participation to meet the human needs of small rural villages. By seeing the potential in poor, marginalized villages, Salah created a sustainable community-based model for development founded on the notion that development and modernization do not necessarily entail urbanization or a move to the cities. Salah believes that the community development process is largely an educational process, and that the prerequisite for Egypt’s sustainable development is citizens who are free, well educated, well-informed, and technically skilled, who can actively participate in their own development process.
Salah selected one marginalized village, Basaysa in Al-Sharqiya governorate, and introduced a completely new concept to the field of development. He used an active participatory method to mobilize the community members to transform this village into an educational center and diffuse its methods to other communities facing similar problems as far away as Sinai. By using locally available resources and by including all villagers to discuss their needs, Salah created an integrated approach to development—one that sought to address the social, economic, and political problems faced by the inhabitants. His program included providing inhabitants with training in agriculture and the efficient use of natural resources, literacy, and perhaps most importantly, group collaboration and community building. With no limitations on which citizens participate, the Basaysa model has turned a poor and marginalized area into an amazing example of how a flexible well thought-out plan can result in sustainable development—and today its impacts have reached well beyond Egypt.

In Egypt there exist approximately 30,000 small communities known as satellite villages, each with a population of less than 1000 inhabitants and most without roads, education, electricity, health care, sewage systems and other basic infrastructure. These satellite villages continue to multiply on the outskirts of Egypt’s biggest cities because of the massive influx of people to cities each year and the inability of these cities to accommodate the citizens’ most basic needs. In Cairo in particular, the lack of adequate housing has driven hundreds of thousands to take desperate measures such as moving into tombs in the notorious “City of the Dead.”

These villages in Egypt have long been deprived of the means to improve their lives through education, and the measures that have been taken to find a solution to village underdevelopment have not taken the villagers’ special needs into account. Examples of these failed attempts are particularly visible when taking gender into consideration: young girls have only a two percent likelihood of finishing secondary school. This can often be attributed to traditional values, which do not change at the same pace as educational reforms. Girls often have to finish their chores at home before attending school—a fact that has been overlooked, and therefore has resulted in girls simply not attending school. Strategies to address education in rural areas must not overlook traditional values and beliefs in order to be successful.

Although attempts to solve this dilemma have been hindered by a general mistrust on all levels, Egyptians will soon find themselves in a situation where they have no choice. In addition to the squatter areas that continue to grow, it is estimated that in the near future over one million people per year will move out from the Nile delta or else the problems of poverty, starvation and unemployment will reach astronomical levels. A strategic plan for the development of those new desert communities is critical to their success.

Salah began working in the small village of Basaysa in 1974. For nine years he held informal meetings, planning and constructive dialogue in order to identify and understand the basic problems faced by rural inhabitants and to begin developing strategies for improvement. In 1983, he and his team of university volunteers registered two citizen organizations devoted to the improvement of Egyptian community life and the launching of helpful community development activities—the Community Development Association and a Community Cooperative for Production (Basaysa-CDA and Basaysa-CCP). One of the first activities involved what Salah calls “the return of the educated to combat illiteracy.” It became obvious during the community meetings that illiteracy was critical roadblock to community development. However, only a limited number of educated people lived in the larger villages and there was also no means of transportation at that time. They solved this by buying bicycles on installment and collected the cost of one bicycle and used it as a revolving fund. By the end, a number of educated people returned, began a literacy program and had an easy and inexpensive means of transportation. The capital for the fund was collected from rich and poor alike, and loans were used as revolving funds to get bicycles for a large number of community members.

Salah’s efforts have helped villagers create many more community-based projects and initiatives, and to introduce many new technologies, especially renewable energy technologies, photovoltaics for education, job training, and production and biogas plants.

In 1985, an Integrated Rural Technology Center for Training and Production (Basaysa-IRTECTAP) was constructed at Basaysa to provide technical training, flow of information, and to upgrade the production processes in rural areas. The center is a facility for continuous public education in environmental protection and awareness, providing access to information, training, and appropriate technologies for the rural population and especially for women.

Some of the training had to be carried out at night, which immediately led to a dilemma since they had no source of light. To get around this problem Salah introduced the idea of solar energy and with his technical assistance, Salah helped the community members to install and operate the first solar power system of its kind in the entire region. The community now operates on solar energy in addition to two biogas plants used for solid waste treatment.

By 1992, the rate of literacy, university graduation and even PhDs coming out of Basaysa had increased dramatically. The Basaysa model itself, although not replicated exactly, was adopted by local and international citizen sector organizations in their approach to development. However, as is the case in all of Egypt, the rate of unemployment remained high. To solve this Salah and the community members decided to create the “New Basysa” through a program that he developed in the village called “Youth Training for Employment.” The objective was to train these youth to manage their own small enterprises and to help them apply for loans, and then to move to the desert land to cultivate it. Thus two problems were solved, finding employment for youth and increasing the cultivated land in Egypt outside the Nile Delta.

The community of New Basaysa (located in the South Sinai) is a new community-owned settlement for migrants from the crowded areas of the delta. It is composed of 100 families reclaiming about 750 feddans (approximately 750 acres) of desert land using organic agriculture, biogas plants and solar energy for the households. Each young person is given five feddans to cultivate, although it is also possible for a person living elsewhere to invest in an additional five and have another young person cultivate the land. The investor is given a percentage at the end of the year, but the main income remains in the village. Salah was a pioneer in the creation of this first eco-desert community, New Basaysa, which can be used as a model to help solve the population problem and promote internal migration within Egypt.

Salah formed a citizen sector organization in 2000—the General Association for Internal Migration and Development—in order to promote his ideas for sustainable community development, and to help other citizen sector organizations implement them. He is currently preparing for his second project in Farfara Oasis (1000 feddans) and discussing the possibility of helping Sudanese citizen sector organizations to construct new communities based on his ideas and models.

During the 30 years since he first began working with rural villagers, tens of thousands have improved their condition in regard to poverty and unemployment. Salah has proven that, given the right tools, even the most underdeveloped area can turn into a sustainable example of development. His grassroots initiatives are models for sustainable community development for citizen sector organizations working in similar fields.

Salah was born in 1941 in Zagazig and later moved to Cairo where he received his B.S. in Physics and Chemistry in 1962. Subsequent to graduation he was appointed as a research fellow in the Atomic Energy Establishment, where he worked throughout his graduate years on the radiation effects of glass. In 1966, after completing an M.S in Nuclear Physics, his father passed away and left Salah with the responsibility of taking care of his brother’s education, his sister’s marriage, and his mother’s welfare. As a result, he could not finish his PhD abroad as planned and he signed up at Cairo University in order to get a PhD in Solid State Physics. In 1967, because of the war, upon the advice of his thesis supervisor, Prof. Adli Bishay, he accepted a fellowship for 10 months in Uppsala, Sweden, where he finished writing his thesis and gained new experience. This was the first time he had travelled outside of Egypt and had been away from his family. After that, he traveled nearly every year on scientific invitations. He left the Atomic Energy Establishment for the opportunity to work as an assistant instructor at the American University in Cairo. After officially receiving his PhD in 1969, and because of his good research and teaching record, he was offered the title of assistant professor.

In the early seventies, Salah’s interest in physics merged with his interest in development. He saw the state of his country and found people who had the same goal he did: creating a better Egypt. He examined the problem of Egypt’s status as a developing country and always found the same solution: education. He also thought about ways to encourage educated people to be a part of the development process. Thirty years ago these were all novel questions, when modernization meant urbanization and villages suffered from the resulting loss of intellectual talent. This is how Salah’s journey with the Basaysa village started; a commitment which has come to dominate his life. In 1984, he fell in love with an Egyptian woman whom he later married. He has two sons, Ahmed, aged 17, and Amr, aged 15.

Parallel to his acknowledged contributions in the fields of optical and magnetic properties of solids and radiation effects on materials, Dr. Arafa is well known nationally and internationally for his pioneering work with the environment, utilization of renewable energies and rural community development. He has introduced renewable energy technologies and agricultural waste recycling to many Egyptian villages and remote areas. He has played a key role in promoting biogas technology for environmental protection and production of clean energy and safe fertilizer in rural areas. His field work in the Basaysa village since 1974 is internationally recognized as a model for sustainable community development.