Revitalizing Esna’s Cultural Heritage Assets

Challenge

While tourism has long been an essential sector in Egypt's economic, cultural tourism capitalizing on Egypt's rich heritage remains an untapped opportunity. The city of Esna in Luxor, with its rich and storied history, showed potential to become a center of cultural tourism. However, a lack of site management plans, effective urban management policies, and a low level of local capacity was prohibiting the city from reaching this potential.

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Approach

To transform Esna into a cultural tourism hub, we partnered with Takween Integrated Community Development to develop, implement and promote an alternative tourism approach focused on enhancing cultural assets and preserving cultural heritage. This approach struck a balance between heritage conservation, tourism requirements and local development needs – thereby ensuring socioeconomic benefits for the local community by engaging them in key activities throughout the project. The project worked on reviving and rehabilitating historical buildings in Esna, in order to provide an innovative offering to tourists interested in exploring the rich history and culture of the city. To ensure the inclusion of the local community in this endeavor, CID worked on building the capacity of local craftspeople to produce high quality handicrafts that honor Esna's cultural heritage. We then worked to develop the handicrafts supply chain to link the these craftspeople with traders in the newly-refurbished bazaar.

Results

While tourism has long been an essential sector in Egypt's economic, cultural tourism capitalizing on Egypt's rich heritage remains an untapped opportunity. The city of Esna in Luxor, with its rich and storied history, showed potential to become a center of cultural tourism. However, a lack of site management plans, effective urban management policies, and a low level of local capacity was prohibiting the city from reaching this potential.

WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY

I'm writing to you to let you know that Lafarge Egypt won silver in LafargeHolcim MEA CSR competition under the Education/Employment category for its Occupational H&S Vocational Training Program in Suez!

This is a big milestone for us and couldn't have happened without your support and guidance during the program design and across all its phases.Also special thanks to your amazing team, Sherif and Mostafa, for working extensively on the project and designing a program to address community needs while leveraging on Lafarge Egypt expertise, managing the different program stakeholders while ensuring the project KPIs are met, coming up with creative solutions to solve any issues, devotion, dedication and passion during the different program phases from its launch in 2016 to date.

On behalf of Yasmin and myself, we would like to thank CID for the great effort and for being our extended arm in implementing the "Lafarge Health and Safety Vocational program" in Suez.

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Inji Khalil
Head of Communications, Lafarge Egypt

Citibank Egypt would like to express its deep appreciation of CID’s dedicated team for their support, passion, integrity, and high quality work that was demonstrated over the last year. From downturn to crisis, CID has challenged every misperception on the bank with guided impactful communication strategies that were taken to action towards transforming the downs to up, and adversary to ally.

Having CID as our partner, advising us in unpredictable times has helped us maintain trust and transparency with the media and our clients, which has helped secure Citi’s stand in the market and ensured positive brand perception and coverage worth of millions.

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Lamise Negm
Vice Chairman, Citibank Egypt