National Duty

Yousriya is given a national platform to champion her causes

After becoming a Member of Parliament, Yousriya is able to exert yet more influence over the causes closest to her heart. As well as providing further help for the Zabbaleen community, this experience allows her to further hone her skills in advocacy and create the foundations for her defining philanthropic achievement.

"As we embarked on the 21st century, Egypt was facing numerous challenges on the social, economic, and cultural levels. It was therefore essential to create an organisation that aimed to address these urgent development issues, such as poverty, unemployment, faulty healthcare systems, as well as low levels of access to quality education."

Yousriya Loza-Sawiris

In 1995, Yousriya's influence in Egypt grew even further when she became an MP. Aligned to her expertise, she was appointed to the parliamentary committee for health, environment, and local management.

During her five years in the role she was able to continue her advocacy for the Zabbaleen community. “Among my important goals was to enhance the communities of the garbage collectors,” she recalls in an interview. “And to ameliorate the economic, health, and educational conditions troubling these communities.”

While an MP, Yousriya played an integral role helping yet more of the Zabbaleen community, this time in a settlement known as Torah situated to the south east of Cairo near a prison of the same name. The Zabbaleen here numbered in the thousands, living in tin and cardboard huts without running water or electricity. Having been evicted from a previous location in the 1970s, they were once again being threatened with yet another enforced relocation. That was until Yousriya and APE intervened.

Firstly, Yousriya arranged for those who needed medical treatment to be seen at the local hospital, and then she successfully lobbied for the Zabbaleen to be allowed to stay where they were, and for their living conditions to be upgraded. APE also provided literacy classes, and a mother and child care centre was set up in the settlement. In 1997, the government agreed to allow the community to stay in Tora.

“One of her great achievements was when she was in Parliament,” remembered school friend and APE chair Suzie Griess. “There was another community of garbage collectors in a place called Torah, and when she was appointed to Parliament, Yousriya was able to convince the governorate of Cairo and the governor that the people should not be evicted from this location, but that they could still remain and live in this area and then sort their garbage.”

Yousriya would also use her national platform to address wider issues in Egyptian society, such as poverty, unemployment, and deficient health and educational service.

Yousriya was determined that the culmination of her time as an MP in 2000 would not diminish the impact she could have on the causes she cared most about. And so, a year later, she launched the project that would become her and her family’s defining legacy.