Recycled Rags, Renewed Lives. Education To Fight Exclusion Project. Innovations for Youth No. 3.

This booklet should be of interest to educators and people seeking to understand the mechanisms of exclusion and the forging of new paths towards community empowerment and basic education skills. Many inhabitants of Cairo, Egypt, depend on the zabbaleen/garbage collectors but know very little of these people who make their way up and down the city's crowded streets every day picking up and recovering refuse. If they looked into the zabbaleen's history and that of the garbage neighborhood of Mokattam, they would discover a busy world where inventiveness and the need to survive have given birth to new ways of looking at the environment, basic education, and development. Since 1984, the Association for the Protection of the Environment (A.P.E.) has been working with the zabbaleen in improving living conditions and bringing about change. The result is a series of impressive programs where literacy, numeracy and health are combined with practical skills, rag and paper recycling units, neighborhood upgrading schemes, an organic compost plant, a children's club, a nursery and much more. Today, the zabbaleen, in collaboration with A.P.E., are taking their skills and programs beyond their neighborhood of Mokattum to other garbage villages around Cairo, to South Sinai and abroad. This spread of expertise shows how waste management can become an entry point for the empowerment of the excluded. (LB)