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Egypt: Poor Quality, Limited Knowledge and Threats to Health

by Samia Galal Saad, Alexandria  University

In today’s Egypt, lack of water in the household can create violent acts from males against their spouses or female relatives. As in most countries around the world women and children are responsible for securing the daily water requirement of their families. And in many parts of Egypt, this daily chore has become the source of a crisis and a burdensome struggle which weighs on the shoulders of women.

In Cairo and other major cities in Egypt, about 95 percent of the residents have constant access to treated drinking water which. In rural areas water is not running more than 50-70 percent of the time, because of failure in compact treatment units and a lack of water in the canals from which water is withdrawn for treatment. This is due to excessive water pumping for agricultural irrigation. However, even where there is readily available water, in both rural and urban areas, the quality of water delivered is not potable due to the increasing levels of agricultural, industrial, and domestic pollution without respective increases in treatment efforts.

Currently, privatization on the multinational corporate scale is not accepted as a policy by the government. However, in areas at the outskirts of many urban areas, not served by the public distribution system, the government has allowed private enterprise water distribution to take hold. In these cases, private vendors sell water to households at prices five to ten times more than the price charged by the government utilities where they do operate.

Government-owned utilities sell one cubic meter of water to consumers at 50 piasters, which is equivalent to 6.7 cents of a US dollar. In those areas where access to water is private, women are facing a real stress in accessing their daily requirements for drinking and domestic uses. They may pay what is equivalent to one and a half to two US dollars for a cubic meter of water. Water is supplied to those areas in un-hygienically large plastic and metallic tankers owned by local people. In other areas, the only sources accessible to women are contaminated wells. In most of the Delta region, shallow wells are contaminated with bacterial and chemical agents due to pollution from latrines and agriculture runoff.

In several urban and rural areas in the Delta region women’s organizations have succeeded in raising the issue at the highest administrative levels at the Ministry of Housing, which is responsible for the distribution systems and treatment of water. The Ministry of Water Resources and Public Works, which is responsible for the assurance of the water quantities for the country’s different uses, must be lobbied too. Most importantly, more needs to be done to correct the situation in rural areas and haphazardly planed urban areas. Water pricing needs to be changed. Because of the inequity in price between publicly and privately-served areas, women are suffering physically and mentally because of lack of water resources to satisfy their household needs.

Bacterial, viral, and parasitic waterborne diseases affect mostly children in rural areas as well as the populations who still use contaminated canals and drains for their bathing and drinking. Although health services are available for the general population, women and the children for whom they care are the last to seek medical care due to their lack of mobility.

Women, as responsible for the health of their household, should receive more awareness and health education to benefit from the free health care facilities offered by the government. High illiteracy rates – 52 percent for Egyptian women – hinder female awareness and education because women cannot usually make use of written health education materials. Mass communication through the radio and television is beginning to compensate for this, and increasing number of programs are educating women about their environmental health problems and how to tackle them. 

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