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

This is to express my great gratitude to CID for a long, impactful, and economically successful partnership and cooperation over several decades. GFA has cooperated with CID at multiple fronts and implemented dozens of multi-million Euro projects and studies related to the development of the Egyptian economy in particular to, private sector development, industrial reform, and vocational training.The partnership was strong and grew even stronger in troubled times, resting on the trust built over time and the dedication of both teams to outstanding quality standards in service delivery.

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Klaus Altemeier
Managing Director of GFA (1993 - 2019)

I would like to thank you for the good job you did for our company for this assignment which reflects your professionalism , commitment and seriousness. It was truly an enjoyable experience.

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Gamal Said
Electronics Sector Director, Alfa Electronics