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Monitoring and guiding development in rural Egypt: local sustainable development indicators and local Human Development Indices

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Abstract

This paper puts forward sustainable development indicators and an index appropriate for monitoring and guiding development planning in the villages of rural Egypt, as an improvement on the current approach which is informed by locally calculated Human Development Indices (HDI). This has two principal weaknesses. Firstly many of the issues of importance to villagers are not covered by the economic and social scope of the HDI. Secondly the HDI, along with international sustainable development indicator sets, fails to identify problems which are of importance in specific national or sub-national contexts. We have therefore worked from a simplified but holistic model of the socio-economic-environmental system of a rural Egyptian village, informed by the outputs of a participatory planning process. An indicator set based on a one-to-one correspondence between system components and indicators was created. This comprehensive set is detailed but consequently rather unwieldy, and a core set is selected and compared with the HDI indicators for a sample of villages to demonstrate the impact of considering environmental and institutional factors on establishing priority areas for government intervention. We conclude that a combination of a locally relevant index and an easily comprehended diagrammatic approach to presenting a small indicator set offers advantages to decision makers in comparison to local application of the HDI.

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Notes

  1. Population figures can only be approximate, particularly given the rapid rate of population growth (1.7% per annum, (CIA 2008). The 2006 national census gave a total population of 72.1 million (CAPMAS 2007), while the most recent CIA World Fact Book gives a mid-year 2008 estimate of 81.7 million (CIA 2008). The 2006 census figures are used in this paper.

  2. The pursuit of the MDGs hardly reduces this bias. Although MDG 7 is to ‘ensure environmental sustainability’, the only quantified goal it contains is to halve the population without access to safe drinking water (UN 2007).

  3. These indicators are: life expectancy at birth (in years); a combination of adult literacy as a percentage and educational enrolment (as a percentage across primary, secondary and tertiary sectors); and the logarithm of purchasing-power-adjusted GDP per capita (in US$). ‘Dimensional’ indices are constructed for each indicator by positioning its value for a country or other administrative entity on a scale between defined ‘goalposts’ (25 and 85 years for life expectancy, US$100 and $40000 for GDP and so on) at a point calculated as:

    \( \frac{{{\text{Actual value}} - {\text{Minimum value}}}}{{{\text{Maximum value}} - {\text{Minimum value}}}} \)

    All values thus lie on a scale between 0 and 1. The total HDI is then the unweighted arithmetic mean of the three sub-indices, the educational sub-index being the weighted mean (2/3 adult literacy index +1/3 gross enrolment index). (UNDP 2007).

    When the index was launched, the use of income as proxy for ‘decent living standards’ was deprecated by the report’s own authors, who reluctantly accepted that data problems necessitated ‘for the time being making the best use of an income indicator’ (UNDP 1990: 12). Eighteen years later the same indicator is still in use.

  4. All indicators and their underlying definitions of development embody normative positions. The essentially contested nature of the concept of sustainable development is beyond the remit of this paper (see Jacobs 1999; Connelly 2007). Suffice it to say that despite the inescapable disputes over exactly what ‘counts as’ sustainable development, there is an agreed ‘first level’ definition encapsulated in the Brundtland Report’s ‘development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987: 43). Criteria for indicators of the kind suggested by Maclaren follow fairly naturally from this.

  5. Generalisations in this field are difficult, since there is an enormous the ‘grey literature’ of indicator sets.

  6. Egypt is thus approximately four times the size of the United Kingdom, and slightly more than three times the size of New Mexico (CIA 2008).

  7. At a national level this loss is to some extent offset by the opening of ‘new lands’ through irrigation in the Western desert. At a local level, however, there is a straightforward trade-off between urban growth and farmland loss, except where settlements can expand into the desert beyond the boundary of irrigated agricultural land. This is not possible across most of the Delta, where most villages are surrounded by agricultural land.

  8. Egypt’s 27 governorates are the highest level sub-national administrative units. Four are classified as ‘urban’ (Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said and Suez), while the remainder are a mixture of rural and urban areas. The comparison between urban and other governorates does not capture precisely the distinction between urban and rural areas, but the data presented here and the supporting text of successive HDI reports make it clear that the rural population is substantially disadvantaged. In 2006, the population of the Lower Egyptian governorates was 73% rural, 27% urban.

  9. While by current standards of international development the GOPP work is not very ‘participatory’, within the context of Egypt’s highly centralised and authoritarian state it is a significant departure from past practice, and one which challenges both implementers and participants.

  10. This connects to a wider issue about the creation of indicators which goes beyond the question of correlation. Creating indicators involves multiple decisions about exactly what information to present. As Briggs and Connelly (1998) point out, not only variable selection but choice of denominator is also crucial. Continuing with the example of loss of agricultural land, in Lower Egypt this is a major problem which needs to be highlighted. We have chosen to use absolute rates of loss (feddan/year), as this indicates places of particular concern in the context of an overall challenge to food production. As an alternative, loss rates could have been presented as proportions of village land totals (% of village land/year), which would draw attention to places facing local sustainability challenges but would obscure the contribution that they make to overall resource loss. Such choices, and the ensuing trade-offs of information foregone, are unavoidable and need to be made consciously and defensibly in terms of the purposes of the set. Of course, given the multi-purpose nature of most indicator sets, this process is unlikely to be straightforward or entirely satisfactory to every audience!

  11. Significantly all three are environmental, reflecting the current lack of such data in Egypt.

  12. Markaz (literally ‘centre’ in Arabic) are the administrative units into which governorates are divided. Each is composed of several ‘mother’ villages, each with smaller ‘satellites’.

  13. See Munda (2005) for a detailed example and critique of this approach, which he concludes by preferring the benchmarking and presentation of separate indicators. We have reversed the order of his argument here in order to arrive finally at a comparison of sustainability and human development indices, but concur with his critique.

  14. For each indicator, each village thus gets a score of 100 × (actual value-minimum value)/(maximum value-minimum value) or the difference between this figure and 100, depending on whether high or low scores are desirable. As with the benchmarking process above, the result is a set of scores ranging from 0 to 100%, with high scores desirable on sustainability grounds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Urban Planning and Design, Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

    Marwa A. Khalifa

  2. Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK

    Stephen Connelly

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  1. Marwa A. Khalifa
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  2. Stephen Connelly
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Correspondence to Stephen Connelly.

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Khalifa, M.A., Connelly, S. Monitoring and guiding development in rural Egypt: local sustainable development indicators and local Human Development Indices. Environ Dev Sustain 11, 1175–1196 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-008-9173-0

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