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

We are where we are today due to CID’s dedication to the task at hand, their professionalism in handling it, sincerity in addressing our concerns, encouragement when we needed some and generosity always. The journey is still long, but we have taken the first step and we hope we can always count on your support.

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Olfat Mansour
Board Member, Al Nour Wal Amal Association

We would like to thank the CID team for all the long hours and dedication to designing our innovation process.

The execution of this innovation process was supported with CID’s organizational network analysis tool, which provided great insight within our organization, allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of its functional, social and strategic networks. The CID team worked closely with our team throughout the process, providing strategic and consistent support. CID’s professional and timely commitment really has helped us kick-start our innovation process.

Thank you for making this happen!

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Heba Makhlouf
Head of Investment Relations & Innovation, SODIC