Participatory Design: Building Sustainable Solutions For The Ezba Slum Community
Ahmed El-monem is all smiles when he shows me the detailing on the seams of a freshly-sewn, maroon polo t-shirt. “Someday, I want a stranger in Paris to buy a product manufactured in Ezba not as an act of charity, but because he believes it is a really well-designed, premium fashion brand. That is our dream,” says the 22-year-old volunteer at Alashanek Ya Balady (AYB) — a student-run organization for sustainable development of underprivileged communities in Cairo, Egypt. Ahmed and his team lead AYB’s Made in Ezbet social clothing enterprise that helps residents of the nearby Ezbet Abu Qarn slum (or Ezba, in short) learn sewing and embroidery to manufacture clothes. They transfer 100% of the sales revenue to the workers.
We have this conversation standing in an unventilated, dimly lit 8ft x 8ft room in Al Mashgal in Cairo. The place has four tables stacked beside each other with sewing machines on them. The finished clothes beside these machines reflect anything but the surroundings that gave birth to them, and perhaps speak more about the hands that made them.
The A-Team
It was April 2019 and I had flown down from Mumbai to Cairo to lead a Ycenter Sustainable Design program in association with AYB’s Ain Shams University (ASU) branch and Giza Systems Education Foundation. The project brought together 28 engineers, social volunteers, product designers and education specialists from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Our mission? To learn, research, analyze and design solution prototypes for the Ezbet Abu Qarn slum community over a period of 10 intense days. We were tackling UN SDG-based problem statements as diverse as “How might we foster an economy that encourages local craftsmanship” to “How might we reduce youth illiteracy by providing accessible education to mothers” to “How might we reduce electronic waste accumulation through community-driven recycling techniques”.
Ezbet Abu Qarn is one of the oldest and largest informal settlements in the middle east, spread over an area of 11 hectares in Old Cairo and bordering the ruins of El Futstat in the south (which served as the capital of Egypt for 500 years between 7th and 12th century AD). The United Nations Human Settlements Programme [UN-Habitat] defines a slum household as one that lacks one or more of the following:
1. Access to improved water
2. Access to improved sanitation
3. Security of tenure
4. Durability of housing
5. Sufficient living area
With a population of 12 million and a struggling economy, the residents of Ezba face all of those problems and more.
The working group at the bootcamp used Ycenter’s experiential design framework and the UN SDG indicators as a model to identify solvable challenges around healthcare, education, sanitation, trade and employment for the population of Ezba. The program took the participants through the entire process of breaking down a complex problem, finding patterns and cause-effect relationships, mapping stakeholders, designing product prototypes and running user tests, turning an idea into an actionable solution and finally making a business model for it.
The result was a multi-cultural exercise in building empathy and looking at familiar problems from a whole new perspective. Ycenter’s modular pedagogy (think Lego, but for education) enabled us to have instructions and content translated live from English to Arabic without any loss in impact (or humour). Upholding our philosophy of a global classroom experience, the participants also connected live with students at a parallel Ycenter Design Thinking workshop happening half-way across the world at Queens College City University of New York — exchanging project insights and learning.
The team often worked 12-hours a day for 10 days straight, making the studio our home, to produce the final project blueprints. The solutions were designed after considering stakeholder feedback early into the prototyping process though first-person interviews with the Ezba slum residents — designing with the people instead of for the people.
The Projects
Here’s a quick roundup of 3 of the most interesting participant projects:
1. Edu-vision: Illiteracy cannot be solved unless mothers champion education. With that powerful insight, the team consisting of Akram, Lamia, Ahmed and Mostafa built an education program that connects literate mothers with illiterate mothers and provides peer-to-peer community learning opportunities to solve the problem of their children dropping out of school.
2. Ezba marketplace: Ezba has a prominent but financially struggling handicrafts community. Since most of the Ezba economy is still based on the barter system in the absence of liquid cash, the team consisting of Ishaq, Nagwa, Okasha and Mansour created a model for a peer-to-peer open marketplace based on a decentralized, offline token-based currency inspired by Blockchain to showcase and support the local culture and its artisans & vendors. The model also accounted for a community center in the middle of the market for kids and events.
3. The Can-do Wire Splitter: To help cut down air pollution due to burning of cables, the team consisting of Hegazy, Dawood, Shimaa and Yara created the blueprint for a portable, hand-operated wire shredder that splits the inner copper mesh from the plastic / rubber coating. The team also created a plan to educate people & recycle the cable components to ensure a circular economy.
The Impact
AYB and Giza Systems Education Foundation is currently working on incorporating these solutions into their economic development plans for the region.
But perhaps the greatest impact story came in July 2019 — three months after the completion of the bootcamp at the Fab 15 International Conference in El Gouna by the Red Sea in Egypt. I was a keynote speaker at the event and chanced upon the Fab Lab On Wheels — a mini-van retrofitted with fabrication equipment to turn it into a moving maker lab. Ishaq Mohamed, an engineer and ex-participant from the bootcamp’s Ezba Marketplace team, had an ear-to-ear grin as he showed me around the van.
While discussing its philosophy of “bringing the tools to the people instead of the people to the tools,” he proudly narrated his life-changing experience of using Ycenter’s design principles and teaching our framework to fishing stakeholders in Fayoum, his hometown in an oasis in Middle Egypt. Fayoum is plagued by surface water pollution due to shrimp shell waste. In response, Ishaq and his team were able to design a low-cost solar dryer to turn the shrimp shell waste into animal protein and create a circular economy through Design Thinking.
The Way Forward
Egypt is one of the fastest growing tourists destinations in the world with approximately 8 million tourist footfalls in 2017 alone - mostly drawn to the historical attractions in places like Cairo and Luxor. But if the pyramids and grand temples have taught us anything, Egypt also has a deep heritage of a maker culture and a history of transcending the boundaries of innovation. Unbeknownst to most, the country is also tormented by a wide array of modern, humanitarian problems in regions that do not get as much global attention. But on the positive side, there’s a growing community of young leaders using cutting-edge design and technology to find indigenous solutions to these local issues and open source it to the world.
Ycenter is committed to support this movement through its inclusive design frameworks and will be back in Egypt for a new project, men ennaya.
Are you in?
