Employees at the Beni Edrees Wastewater Facility in ’s Assiut Governorate. Photo credit: Tinne Van Loon for USAID Photo Essay: USAID’s 40-Year Legacy in Water and Wastewater Meets the Needs of Egypt’s Growing Population June 13, 2017

gypt today is a country in transition. With one of the fastest growing populations Ein the world — estimates suggest that the population will increase from 93 to 120 million people by 2030 — Egypt’s infrastructure needs to keep pace.

In both urban and rural areas, population growth has led to an expansion of settle- ments that strain current water and wastewater systems. Often, settlements are built over the heavily polluted, unsanitary waterways, posing a public health threat by carrying the risk of waterborne disease.

For more information, please visit Globalwaters.org. 1 A man turns on the new faucet in his home in . Photo credit: Mohamed Abdel- wahab for USAID

Since 1978, USAID invested more than $3.5 billion to help bring potable water and sanitation services to more than 25 million Egyptians, directly improving their health and environmental conditions. The Egypt Utilities Management (EUM) program has been a key contributor to this legacy; this $440 million investment by the American people over ten years has led to an increased quality of life for 10.5 million Egyptians.

A pump station in Assiut, Egypt. Photo credit: Mohamed Abdelwahab for USAID

For more information, please visit Globalwaters.org. 2 Building on more than two decades of success in the water sector — including mod- ernizing the and sewer systems — USAID worked with the Gov- ernment of Egypt (GOE) from 1997–2007 to construct 30 water and wastewater facilities in Fayoum, Beni Suef, and Minya governorates to benefit more than 3 million people. However, those systems did not anticipate the rapid population growth — nearly 11 million people currently live in those three governorates.

Beni Suef Wastewater Treatment Plant, 2004. Photo credit: USAID

Through the EUM agreement, USAID also supported the GOE’s water sector re- forms, including the establishment in 2004 of the quasi-governmental Holding Com- pany for Water and Wastewater (HCWW) to improve operations, maintenance, planning, and expansion of the infrastructure.

For more information, please visit Globalwaters.org. 3 Photo credit: Tinne Van Loon for USAID

Many of USAID’s current water efforts are possible due to the decentralization of the potable water and sanitation sector in Egypt. USAID worked with the HCWW to develop 25 local, public utilities — and to transfer utility management from the central HCWW to these autonomous water and sanitation companies. USAID helped automate operational and billing systems and provide institutional strength- ening support and capacity building for these local companies — including the ability to plan and budget for necessary expansions due to population growth.

A woman in Upper Egypt shows the contract for the household water connection supported by USAID. Photo credit: Mohamed Abdelwahab for USAID

For more information, please visit Globalwaters.org. 4 USAID works with these local water companies through a follow-on EUM agree- ment to increase access to water and sanitation in underserved communities of rural Upper Egypt, including Beni Suef, Minya, Assiut, , , , and , by constructing wastewater facilities for basic sanitation and installing and improving pipelines and household connections for potable water and sanitation services.

A woman in Upper Egypt stands next to her new sink. Photo credit: Claudia Gutierrez/USAID

Better water and wastewater services and facilities contribute to health and liveli- hoods improvements and also create thousands of construction jobs for day labor- ers.

Installing pipes in Beni Suef, Egypt. Photo credit: USAID

For more information, please visit Globalwaters.org. 5 “We used to have to take our children to the doctor. We washed our clothes in the canal or in the sewage water and our kids got sick from this bad water,” says Om Taha, a resident of Awlad Suweilem Village in . “The clean water is 100 times better than the water that came from the ground.”

A family in Minya, Egypt. Photo credit: USAID

This article appears in Global Waters, Vol. 8, Issue 4; for past issues of the magazine, visit Global Waters’ homepage on Globalwaters.org.

For more information, please visit Globalwaters.org. 6