Mohamed El-Mongy

Mohamed El-Mongy is reactivating the Nile Basin as a community of communities, connected to the land and water, to regenerate the social and landscape systems affected by decades of mistrust, political tensions, and environmental degradation.

With 62 water sheds in Africa and 250 million people depending on it, the Nile River is the longest river in the world, spanning across 11 countries. Though it is one of the richest river basins in the world in terms of history and heritage, it is also one of the most fought-over trans-boundary water bodies rooted in social, cultural, and identity-related issues.

Through N.I.L.E Journeys (NJ), which stands for Nurturing Impulses for Living Ecosystems, El-Mongy is shifting the narrative around the Nile Basin from one of division to one of reconnection. He does this by addressing two major problems from a non-political perspective: (i) water scarcity and consequential environmental degradation, and (ii) mistrust among communities and nations, obstructing effective collaboration in the bioregion. The main reason that current solutions tackling water scarcity are neither feasible nor sustainable is their exclusion of social and cultural factors with mistrust at their roots.

At the local level, Nile Journeys is laying the foundation for a deeply rooted community resilience by working through local community hubs across the Nile Basin. The hubs are prototypes of the societies El-Mongy wants to model. Along with his team, he identified and partnered with eight community hubs directly impacting over 95,000 people in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Nile Journeys is advancing programs pertaining to land and water regeneration (permaculture), social cohesion, reconciliation, eco-village design and others, all designed by experts in partnership with international organizations such as Waterlution, Gaia Education and the Presencing Institute.

On the trans-boundary level, NJ is creating spaces for interaction, exchange, and dialogue to give voice to the Nile’s multiple stories. This is laying the ground for a paradigm shift in the way different communities self-identify and perceive a shared identity, and also how foreign stakeholders perceive the dynamics of this bioregion. Despite how challenging it is to secure core funding for an idea targeting a region that is not officially recognized by donor agencies, and a region comprised of 11 countries, most of which face economic and political turmoil, El-Mongy was able to secure solid local, regional, and international partnerships for years to come.

Although it is considered the longest river in the world, the Nile carries relatively little water. Yet it also cuts through 11 African countries with a combined population of 437 million people. 257 million of those live within the river basin and depend directly or indirectly on the Nile for their livelihood. For centuries, these communities have been reeling from the effects of colonization and hastily drawn borders. Attempts to import traditional developmental models from the global North have failed to foster collaboration among riparian countries. At the same time, complex political issues have hindered any South-South collaboration. Regulatory obstacles within some countries, like Egypt, make it even more difficult to invoke change.

The Nile Basin’s inhabitants have long been tapping the river for hydropower, fishing, and drinking water. Most critically though, they have drawn upon it to irrigate farmland. This dependency on the Nile, along with rapid population growth, and climate change and its effects, makes water supply increasingly erratic. This led to decreased access to water as well as the deterioration of its quality, especially in rural communities. As a result, the quality of soil has worsened and so has the quality of food and people’s livelihood. The inability of riparian countries to adapt and deal with the effects of climate change is mainly the result of their attempts to address this issue in isolation as opposed to opting for collaborative action that is respectful of local communities and their cumulative indigenous wisdom. As water becomes scarcer, tensions around the control of the Nile’s water continue to mount.

A recent example showing the rising tensions among riparian countries, Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, is the disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Negotiations have followed the historical trend of addressing water scarcity issues from a purely hydrological and political perspective thus removing any possibility for potential collaboration. Though water access is a shared challenge for all sectors in almost all of the countries, they have continued to fail to collaborate on issues pertaining to water and dam-building.

In water scarce regions, there is consensus among scientific researchers, practitioners, and social experts that individual countries’ needs, despite their particularities, cannot be addressed in isolation. Studies have shown that identity is often the root cause of conflict or co-operation, and the Nile’s dynamics are as complex as it gets in terms of hydrology, history, colonial legacy, geography, population, and dependency. Because of this complexity and the deeply rooted historical baggage, so far, existing organizations have only been addressing a small aspect of a multifaceted issue. There are very few initiatives holistically tackling the Nile Basin as a region because it is not socially or politically acknowledged. In addition, there are neither fully independent grassroots nor community networks tackling the issue nor organizations that support cross-boundary projects beyond conferences and gatherings.

Addressing these issues requires deep trust, strong resilience, high empathy, refined collaborative skills, an evolved worldview across all layers of society, and a shared identity centered around the river (Nile) and the land (Africa).
In order to counter the regional divides causing the lack of collaboration, El-Mongy is reconnecting the Nile Basin communities on social, ecological, and cultural levels through grassroots initiatives, moving beyond political agendas. He does this within the framework of four main crosscutting themes, embedded in all of Nile Journeys’ activities, which are (i) art and culture, (ii) land and water regeneration, (iii) gender equity and reconciliation, and (iv) green entrepreneurship. Under their umbrella, he adopts his two-pronged approach which works on both the local and trans-boundary levels to (i) regenerate citizens’ connection to the land, river, and forgotten beneficial local practices, and (ii) reconnecting Nile citizens to each other.

Nile Journeys does so through local community hubs, or acupuncture points, around the Nile Basin that serve as prototypes of the resilient and connected societies that El-Mongy wants to model and replicate. A community hub is a pre-existing space that works towards regenerating and restoring the land in one or more of the basin countries (i.e., permaculture: permanent sustainable agriculture). These spaces are independent of NJ and could be anything from a café to a local NGO or orphanage but are all aligned with NJ’s guiding principles. They are selected based on a set of rigorous criteria and undergo a one-year probation period to ensure alignment with NJ, after which their commitment is further assessed. Nile Journeys supports the needs of these hubs to thrive (funding, capacity building, exposure, connections, planning, etc.) and provides a regional link for them to scale their impact and expand their learning opportunities. as well as facilitate exchange within the Nile Basin. Physical gatherings, best-practice sharing, or joint projects are only a few of many collaborations that have already taken place.

El-Mongy is regenerating connection to the land and river through eight community hubs in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, starting with communities that are deeply connected to the Nile. NJ programs that are implemented at the community hubs are designed for land and water regeneration in partnership with several organizations working in the field. Examples of programs in place include the Water Innovation Lab, supporting local innovation in the field of water, in partnership with Waterlution; Permaculture Design, growing food in synchronicity with nature for earth care, people care, and fair share; and Ecovillage Design Education, designing sustainable communities in partnership with Gaia Education. Nile Journeys also successfully established permacultures in three hubs: a farm in Fekra organization in Aswan, in KCC in Tanzania, and in Tiriji and Rusinga Island in Kenya that are leading the local land regeneration in their communities. It is also expanding to other strategic locations like some islands on Lake Victoria which instantly gives NJ access to three countries at once.

On top of that, El-Mongy is regenerating connections to local heritage, the shared Nile identity and local practices that are often overlooked yet are very important in facing many of the region’s contemporary challenges. The community hubs provide an opportunity for different communities to narrate stories of their connections to the Nile – tales that are sources of glory and pride. Many of these stories are similar across many cultures in the Nile Basin. They are researched, documented, and highlighted in a series of YouTube videos and in printed publications such as books with pictures of these communities (printing in progress). This way readers from the Nile Basin are brought closer to the Nile, and consequently closer to their common heritage. Educational and exchange programs like Alwan Afriquia (Arabic for African Colors) in Egypt; the construction of IPI, the Pan-African Children Education and Learning Centre in Kenya; the ongoing registration of a new film academy for African youth; and online exposure of Nile Stories, through the soon-to-be launched platform, are examples of NJ’s progress on this front. Another example is the Karmakol Festival that was set to take place in Sudan in 2021 but was postponed due to the coup. Now, scheduled to take place in 2023, in collaboration with 50 partners, the three-week long festival will include 200 artists from all over the region that will gather to co-create.

Furthermore, through NJ’s virtual platform, physical gatherings, trainings, and transnational projects, El-Mongy is further reconnecting Nile citizens to each other. The online platform is the virtual space through which NJ facilitates the flow of positive information about Nile countries in four languages. Nile Journeys also organizes youth camps, leadership training, dialogue workshops, and exchange programs designated to provide spaces for Nile Basin citizens to interact and better understand each other. In fact, El-Mongy has started to create a mental shift by engaging institutions and communities within societies that hold deep-seated animosity towards each other such as Egypt and Ethiopia. He exemplifies the values that he instills in these communities through an integrative leadership style with a horizontal hierarchy and fluid leadership while consulting experts. Each component of NJ’s conceptual framework has its own head, and El-Mongy hired Monitoring and Evaluation personnel to follow-up on the overall achievements.

Due to the complexity of the issue, having to work across many countries to realize systemic change and doing so through a multi-layered process, progress has been slow. But El-Mongy is adamant. He believes that to truly achieve sustainable systemic change, it must be organic; target communities must be allowed to work at their own pace. It has also been a challenging task to secure core funding for his idea as it targets a region that is not officially recognized by donor agencies and spreads across a range of countries facing economic and political turmoil. However, to date, NJ’s initiatives reached more than 95,000 people in five countries and El-Mongy has been able to secure funds and partnerships with several organizations including the NOVO Foundation, which is NJ’s main funder, as well as GenderWorks, Swiss Initiative, The BMW Foundation, and The Ubuntu Lab, among others. Securing the trust and financing of partners is itself an acknowledgment of the systemic change that is beginning to influence the policies of organizations and their funding schemes.

El-Mongy has long been fascinated by geography, particularly that of the African continent. After his father gave him a map of Africa, he became enchanted with the Nile River, the unique obvious blue line crossing the continent.

Studying at Cairo University’s Faculty of Commerce exposed El-Mongy to a system characterized by rote memorization and counter-creative teaching methods which quickly bored him, pushing him to take his learning journey into his own hands. Eager to meet new people, and live new experiences, El-Mongy joined AIESEC, became the president of AIESEC Egypt and later, the Vice-President of Exchange in AIESEC Slovakia in 1998, which received the award of best AIESEC country in international exchange by the end of his one-year mandate. Later on, he became the chair of AIESEC in Africa, which allowed him to travel to 25 African countries and deepen his connection with the continent.

To delve deeper into his interest in Africa and his passion for the environment, El-Mongy pursued a master’s degree in Environment and Development from the University of Edinburgh, with African studies as complementary subjects, and did his dissertation on a cloud forest in Ghana. Ten years later, he started pursuing his PhD at the Da Vinci Institute in South Africa with the topic of “the Nile Re-Imagined as a Community of Communities,” which was about the creation of the-then-called The Nile Forum. However, he decided to suspend these studies for a few years until The Nile Forum, rebranded The Nile Journeys, is well-established to serve as a solid base for his research.

Another realm that El-Mongy was keen on exploring was Peace Education. Along with his wife, he set up the Misriyati (Arabic for “Egyptian-ity”) initiative that was later incubated by Nahdet El-Mahrousa, one of Egypt’s largest social start-up incubators. The idea of Misriyati revolved around “respecting the land that holds us regardless of color, race, gender, social status, religion, etc., and celebrating our Egyptian-ity". The initiative evolved into a company that offers facilitation and mediation services and is now independently run by a local team. El-Mongy also co-founded Sycamore Consulting which offers private consultancies on conflict resolution, dialogue facilitation, and community development. His engagement with Sycamore now revolves mainly around its intersection with the work of Nile Journeys.

As a convergence of his rich life experiences, El-Mongy decided to combine elements of working on the African level, the environment, mediation and conflict transcendence, dialogue facilitation and sustainable development in what is now known as The Nile Journeys. He relocated from Cairo and now lives in Aswan in Upper Egypt, where one of the community hubs lies because he saw it best to live closer to the communities that he works with.