Sabrina Illiano
Egyptian Foundation for the Advancement of the Childhood Condition (EFACC)
Cairo, Egypt
My first few days in Cairo went by so quickly I could hardly believe it. Within less than a week of arriving, I rode a camel to the pyramids, visited one of the oldest mosques in Cairo, and successfully navigated my way to my first day on the job. The EFACC offices are tucked away on the second floor of an apartment building on a quiet residential street in Nasr City, easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
The majority of my worries quickly evaporated as I was greeted warmly by my supervisor at the door, showed to my very own desk, and promptly offered some tea. After some brief chatting about my travels, my accommodations, and my host family, she handed me a 200-page booklet about Egyptian legislation regarding children, asked me to read it, and told me I could keep it for reference. When I was finished, she gave me a piece of paper with my assignments for the week.
I’d been in the office for less than a day, and already I was tasked with writing three proposals: one for a program on domestic violence, one for a program on female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage, and one for a program to help children who have illegally immigrated. She showed me the standard format of a proposal and how to connect to the wifi, and off I went to begin writing and researching.
Since then, it’s been about a month, and I’ve learned so much about the long, challenging process of making even just a little bit of progress in this field. It is especially difficult here, as EFACC receives very little government cooperation for their efforts and is forced to constantly seek funding and support from various networks. They decided we would combine my first two proposals (domestic violence/FGM/early marriage) into one comprehensive program, so we have been working on developing this proposal to send it to the EU for funding requests.
I have identified two major barriers to human rights progress here, which I’ve termed “activation” and “access.” In 2008, legislation regarding the rights of children was finally codified into Egyptian law, largely thanks to the efforts of the EFACC team. While it seems that this was the easier step, we are now faced with the difficulties of activating this legislation.
Since the codification of these new laws, for example, there has been only one successful prosecution of FGM despite the fact that it is still widely practiced. It is significant that this case even achieved a conviction—two, in fact—considering that the family was unwilling to press charges and the authorities were reluctant to assist the prosecutors.
Now that EFACC has cleared the first hurdle of getting legislation successfully included in Egyptian law, we must figure out how to work with communities to turn these formal laws into effective deterrents to human rights violations of children. This is where we come to the second barrier: access. There are many resources that exist to help at-risk groups with issues such as domestic violence, FGM, and early marriage, but it is very difficult to connect them with these resources. Especially in smaller communities, I’ve been taught, many people are unwilling to acknowledge the new laws because they conflict with ingrained cultural norms, and thus there is a problematic lack of documenting and reporting cases.
In an effort to address this problem, we’re developing a series of educational programs designed to link at-risk groups with relevant NGOs, lawyers, and other resources. The idea is to educate community members, particularly educators in schools, about how to recognize, document, and properly report cases. Ideally, the programs will use schools as an intermediary point between the home and the available resources, with educators who are trained to recognize and deal with problems. Hopefully, this will lead to more cases being successfully prosecuted.
The ultimate goal, of course, is to hold people accountable to the new laws and to enforce concrete consequences for breaking them. The process is long and slow, however, with many hoops to jump through, so unfortunately it will likely be a long time before we begin to see stronger respect for children’s rights. However, I look forward to my future projects with EFACC in the coming month.