Towards a better future

A series of practical programmes to make children and their parents aware of the consequences of environmental pollution and water wastage in Egypt.

It is 42-45 degrees in Cairo as I write this. And it feels even hotter, among all the concrete of that immense city. If you are brave enough to walk the streets outside, you will see the caretakers of buildings everywhere with garden hoses at work. And not to water the plants, but to spray the streets wet to bring some coolness. Water is scarce in a country like Egypt. All water comes from the Nile. And over that Nile are the necessary struggles between the countries through which that lifeline flows, such as Ethiopia and Sudan. Besides the water wastage that may have disastrous consequences for Egypt in the near future, the Nile water is still terribly polluted, including by litter, mostly plastic. The amounts of plastic in circulation in that country are huge and a lot of it ends up in the environment. An ecological disaster is not far off.

Arab Vision's producer has taken up the gauntlet of organising a campaign with local NGOs for better stewardship. Generally speaking people in Egypt live by the day. How to survive today, without thinking much about the future, about the far-reaching pollution and waste of precious water. So we played our small part and we organised workshops for children in Alexandria, Cairo, Aswan and Luxor to help them think about a better future with less pollution and cleaner water. And those children can then help their parents
help again to participate as well.

The workshops were divided into two parts: a theoretical part in which the specialist briefly and simply explained a specific point about climate change and the environment, and an interactive/practical part in which an experiment was done by the children themselves. Six educational videos were made of the different workshops with the related practical elaboration. The videos were made available to the (grassroots) organisations we worked with and shared via social media and satellite TV to raise awareness among a large audience in Egypt, show the relationship between one's own behaviour and lifestyle and damage to climate and the environment.