By Mohammad Ghafari

Translated by Aisha El-Awady

You can find them selling vegetables, cheese and pigeons on public squares, the sides of roads, in the market places and in front of government institutions as the employees head home. All over Cairo you can find these women who come here each morning from nearby villages, bringing with them their simple produce.

Since their husbands have either passed away or are unable to work, these women are forced to come to the city and sell their goods so they can make enough money to support their families, which in some cases include more than 6 members.

Um Hassan, who appears to be over 70, comes each morning to the Bolaq Dakrur market in Giza with her fava beans, which she sells off the tray laying in front of her. She has 3 children of which she says she doesn’t “ever see.”

This is the old woman’s only source of income, and since her husband, who passed away a few months ago, was a self-employed man, she has no pension to help her support herself. She now lives a life of bare necessities and says, “If I don’t come here how I will make a living?”

“The bare necessities” is also how Um Adham describes what she is able to buy with the money she makes from what she sells each day while trying to support her 6 children. At the start of each week, Um Adham travels with others like herself from Al-Fayoum to Giza.

“We come here on Saturday and return back to Al-Fayoum on Wednesday,” she says.

Her trip begins by gathering all of the eggs, pigeons and poultry in addition to the cottage cheese her neighbors have and then off she goes on her trip, which begins at 2 am, to arrive at the market at 7am.

In addition to her 6 children, Um Adham supports her elderly, dependent husband. She says, “I have to rent a room and stay here since I can’t travel back and forth to Al-Fayoum every day.”

She explained that she wouldn’t be troubling herself with traveling this long distance or working if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

“Where I come from, working women are looked down upon,” she says. However, she says she has no other choice and that she has nothing to be ashamed of.

“I am proud of my work, I am not doing anything shameful,” she says.

Dr. Hussein Kishk, a local expert on social issues at the National Center for Social Research, considers the view of some towards the village woman’s work as being shameful, to be a form of “luxury in casting judgments on these women.”

“The only thing that is shameful is for someone not to find enough to eat,” he says.

“In the absence of a breadwinner, it is a necessity for these women to go out and work so they can support their families.”

He pointed out that the perception of the working woman has changed a great deal in the rural community as, “women have been having an ever increasing role in farming the land alongside their husbands or going out to work on their own.”

There are no accurate statistics regarding the percentage of women working as wandering salespeople, as this type of work is classified as part of the informal sector, which is not supervised by the State and therefore no statistics on them are available.

However, a report issued by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics with indicators on women's employment in Egypt in 2008, showed that females between the ages of 15 and 64 that were working in the informal sector made up 47.9% of working females in Egypt.

This amounts to more than 2.1 million girls/women, with 13% or 235,000 of them working in urban areas and the rest working in rural areas. The report also showed that in 1995, the percentage of working females was only 6.9%, indicating an increase in the number of women working in the informal sector in urban areas.

The report also showed that the percentage of self employed, independent women was 27.4% of women working in urban areas. Kishk blames this increase on the declining economic conditions that the Egyptian family has been facing for the past 4 decades, which have “put a further burden on women’s shoulders.”

According to a report by the International Labor Organization on women's employment indicators in 2009, workers migrating from rural to urban settings make up the main portion of the 22-33% of women who are the head of a household in Egypt.

The report went on to say that most of these women tend to work in the informal sector, in marginalized occupations, that are not protected by any laws. Moreover, due to the declining economic situation, many families have resorted to sending their children off to work, only for them end up leaving school.

But Um Abir, a working woman whose situation is similar to the others, is determined that her daughters stay in school. This simple woman says that despite her poor income she is trying to help her daughters find a better future and that she hopes that they will “benefit from a good education.”