Egypt’s ministers of planning and environment witness signing of protocol to study solid waste system

Dr. Hala El-Said, Egypt’s Minister of Planning and Economic Development; Dr. Yasmine Fouad, Minister of Environment; and Major General KhairatBarakat, head of the Planning Ministry’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), witnessed the signing of a cooperation protocol between the CAPMAS and the Waste Management Regulatory Agency of the Ministry of Environment to prepare a study of the current situation of solid waste in Egypt.Dr. El-Said said that the goals of the National Agenda for Sustainable Development, Egypt’s Vision 2030, focuses on three main dimensions: economic, social, and environmental dimensions, which intersect with each other, so that it is not possible to achieve economic and social goals without taking into account the environmental dimension, in the context of preserving the rights of future generations.El-Said explained that the signed protocol aims to collect a large set of data on the environmental sector, stressing that the data is the basic basis for setting all different development policies, so any policy for solid waste management will depend heavily on the important role of CAPMAS in collecting various data on the environment sector, whether oOn the part of the government or the private sector.The minister pointed out that the President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has adopted the law on waste regulation and management, and the Ministry of Environment is leading this great effort in managing the solid waste system.For her part, Dr. Yasmine Fouad confirmed that this study aims to update the data on the municipal solid waste system that was approved by the Egyptian president in 2019 with three programs: infrastructure, employment contracts, institutional support and community participation, by studying the conditions, problems, and challenges of managing existing waste in preparation for developing the plan to meet the challenges and take appropriate decisions to improve the climate that serves the work environment.The Minister of Environment added that the study will examine the conditions of workers in the system, whether at the official and informal levels, the private sector and civil society, which will help lay the foundations for dealing with the waste system during the coming period, especially after the issuance of the first law for waste management of all kinds in Egypt.Fouad explained that this step comes within the efforts of the Ministry's Waste Management Regulatory Authority to organize, follow-up, monitor, evaluate and develop integrated waste management activities, attract and encourage investments in this field in pursuit of sustainable development, and efforts to transform the informal sector in the waste system into a formal sector to integrate it into the system to help On its effectiveness and sustainability.