President Sisi’s inspection tour the other day of the service projects carried out in Qena Governorate under the Decent Life Initiative pointed to the steadiness and seriousness of the state in ensuring the equitable geographical distribution of the developmental drive. By reaching out to villages located deep into the heart of Upper Egypt, the drive for realising comprehensive and sustainable development is in fact acquiring a profound social significance. The commissioning of service projects in Qena, situated some 450 kilometres far from the country’s metropolitan centre, complements the huge drive under way to construct new cities, develop the country’s coastal zones and rebuild the infrastructure required to fix Egypt right on track for living as a modern nation. A review of the projects that President Sisi inspected in Qena the other day implied sufficient indication that the drive for development is targeting the entire land of the country from Sinai in the east to Matruh in the west and from the Nile Delta in the north to Aswan in south. Even with a relatively small population of 55,000 dwellers, the Marashdah village has been provided with a complex that delivers multiple administrative and social services to citizens there in addition to a fully-equipped health and medical care unit with an ambulance service. One project that carried special significance was the village’s library which has been set up through co-operation between the Ministry of Culture and the Decent Life Initiative. For it indicates that the cultural dimension is receiving due attention in the country’s overall development plan.
In addition to reflecting the stat’s keenness on expanding the developmental drive’s capacity to reach all parts of the country, Saturday’s presidential inspection tour of service improvement projects in Qena invokes reference to the Countryside Development Scheme, the ambitious enterprise that aims to improve the living conditions for inhabitants of villages across the country. A primal value of this scheme is that means the effectuation of inter-departmentally and coordinated action to narrow the gap between urban and countryside areas. Mention may also be made in this connection to the state’s serious orientation to spread various aspects of comprehensive and sustainable development nationwide through ensuring that each governorate has a state university, to cite an example of the complementary character of the developmental drive, each of the country’s governorates. In combination with due encouragement of the spread of private, community and international universities, the state is effectively widening the base of academic education – a measure which constitutes a key component of the drive to reform and modernise education.
The other Upper Egypt projects that President Sisi inaugurated during his visit to Qena on Saturday reassert the state’s policy of expanding the foundations of sustainable development in such a manner that stimulates economic growth and improves living conditions. The transport sector’s projects for Upper Egypt serve as a good case in point. Four bridges constructed at a total cost of LE664 million to provide people in Upper Egypt’s governorates with comfortable, safe and efficient traffic over railway lines and across the River Nile, as Transport Minister Kamel el-Wazeer explained in a presentation he made during the inauguration ceremony. Furthermore, the plans to extend the fast electric train network to Upper Egypt would facilitate the movement of people, save them time, elevate environment conservation efforts and establish more efficient social and economic linkages between all governorates.
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