Women learn recycling skills and literacy in Garbage City
169 views · Published 12 December 2018 · 6:36 · Indexed 26 October 2026
Channel: AP Archive · 2018 · News & Politics
(7 Dec 2018) LEADIN: A female-led recycling workshop is offering Egyptian women the chance to showcase their skills. Nothing goes to waste here, the women weave, sew and make products from tin can pulls, remnants of fabric and recycled paper. STORYLINE: Once a fertiliser factory, this is now the Association for Protection of the Environment (APE). It's located in an area of Cairo known as "Garbage City", a place where the community collects the capital's rubbish and recycles it. Not much goes to waste here, especially paper. People sieve through bags and sort them accordingly. This is a low income, underprivileged area, and many people don't have a formal education. But at APE, they are working to teach useful recycling skills alongside literacy. Combining the two has been essential to get women interested in their courses. "A few women social activists decided to teach girls in Zabaleen District how to read and write to help them with their education. This was because a lot of girls and women either leave their schools or never go to it in the first place, just so that they can work and help their families," says Bakheit Zaka, public relations manager at APE. "They started organising classes to combat illiteracy, but they found many people didn't want these classes. So they thought of starting projects that would help these ladies earn money, through which they could enrol in classes to combat illiteracy. And they got a group of ladies to first start weaving carpets from recycled strips of clothes left behind from factories. The project grew and girls started to talk and bring their friends. And it eventually became a tool for enlightening the whole district." APE also looks after a local environmental par, a much-needed green space for the district. The women who attend the centre can now earn money while enrolled to learn literacy skills. Ring pulls from drinks cans are shaped into a bag. Paper is also sorted and made into different objects. They also collect materials from schools and offices and volunteers collect coffee cups. A supervisor from APE, Saada Ragi, says nothing is wasted here. "The patchwork is from the remnants of factory materials. We buy them and recycle them. From these remnants we create table cloths of various sizes. We can also recycle them into bags, shoe-holders, aprons, toys… we use the strips in making almost anything." Traditional hand looms are also put to good use which are worked by the women of the workshop. They have become very skilled in transforming discarded materials into attractive new objects. But their frustration is that sales of their products are still disappointingly low. "The challenge for us is that the sales of these items remains low because Egyptians don't value or appreciate recycled products," says Hoda Fayed, a worker. If their fellow Egyptians learned to love their environmentally friendly products, the women's crafts would become a lot more profitable. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/7a4ec92709b22c0c8b095d870be29e76
