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

The project has successfully developed the Wakalet el-Geddawy Site Management Plan and updated the 2010 Esna City Center Revitalization Plan. We have created sustainable livelihoods opportunities for local craftspeople through skills development activities and market linkages, while also leading awareness-raising and community engagement workshops for 700 students and youth from Esna and neighbouring villages on the value of cultural heritage assets in Esna.

WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY

For over 10 years Xerox Egypt has been in partnership with CID as our Marketing Communications Consultant, and the level of professional support we have been receiving since the inauguration of such successful and rewarding business relationship is invaluable.

The CID team is highly skilled and responsive to our business needs, which enabled us to use CID services to support other business objectives and programs beyond marketing communications, where they have proved similar levels of excellence

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Ashraf El Arman
VP, Global Supplies Group. Former Managing Director, Xerox Egypt

Our work with CID Consulting was focused on the dissemination of participatory urban development procedures and tools in the informal areas of Shoubra El-Kheima, Khosous and Qalyoub. The project necessitated extensive field work, research and direct engagement with city councils and Qalyoubyia governorate. Throughout the project CID community development team, demonstrated hard work, dedication and agility. The team played a very important role in empowering staff in city councils and the governorate to adopt participatory needs assessment methods. The team was further able to moderate community discussions and debates in a participatory and professional manner. We believe CID Consulting was a valuable partner and an important enabler to our social mission.

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Safa Ashoub
Advisor, Participatory Development Programme in Urban Areas (PDP) , GIZ