Maat Foundation for Peace, Development and Human Rights held in cooperation with the Association of Women for Development a new seminar for citizens at Ayat Center in Giza on July 7, 2012.
The aim of the seminars is to raise awareness of decentralization and its social and political variables, as well as monitoring and discussing the problems associated with the citizens to public services and the role of local authorities.
The workshop comes within the framework of the activities of the citizen's voice project 2, which is implemented in cooperation with the Foundation for the Future. It seeks to build the capacity of the Parties to the local community to deal with the variables associated with decentralization so as to improve the quality of public services provided to citizens and to activate the work of popular control of local authorities.
In the seminar, more than 50 citizens "of all classes, ages and of different professions and trades have participated. The seminar dealt with several issues related to the services provided by the executive departments for the Egyptian citizen. The seminar addressed the rights and duties of citizens.
In the seminar, representatives of the leaders of the local authorities in the executive departments, as well as potential leaders and citizens of targeted areas have participated.
In addition to the problems presented by the citizens, workshop also included many of the proposals and recommendations. The most important was "the return of individual system and the abolition of the list system in the local bodies, the expansion of training workshops to hold awareness-raising local elections.
In conclusion, the seminar discussed the most important problems facing the citizens in Ayat. The most important was the lack of awareness of citizens' roles carried out by local bodies, the problem of non implementation of sanitation projects in Ayat, leading to pollution of the environment and spread disease among the population, the mixing of sewage water to irrigate agricultural land. This lead to the deterioration of agricultural production, lack of electricity meters in some areas and the encroachment on agricultural land.
It was agreed to lift all these problems for the equipment concerned through a status report economic and social rights to be prepared by Maat for the province of Giza