How a Cairo initiative turned residents into custodians of heritage

🕌 In the Khalifa district in southern Cairo, history lines the streets. Narrow alleyways run between centuries-old domes and lived-in buildings. Within its compressed geography, successive layers of a capital belonging to different eras overlap, the markers of its past intersecting with the details of its present. The residents who pass through them daily have, for most of their lives, been largely disconnected from what surrounds them. Megawra set out to change that.

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Megawra handles consulting, commercial, community development, and district revitalization projects. The organization has expanded to other heritage areas across Egypt, but its longest-running and most developed presence remains in Khalifa, where it has worked since 2012 under the “Athar Lina” initiative — the umbrella for all its community work in the district.

The organization’s core philosophy is built on turning Khalifa’s residents from passive bystanders to active custodians of their own heritage. In practice, that means integrating children, women, and craftspeople into preservation work; developing interactive educational programs; running participatory planning processes for public spaces; addressing urban and environmental problems through engineering interventions; and building commercial revenue streams — through a product brand and heritage tours — to fund the work long-term, Heritage Works Project Manager and Deputy Director at Megawra Maram Adel (LinkedIn) tells EnterpriseAM.

The legacy behind the legacy

The initiative started with children. After a series of participatory discussions with representatives from the Antiquities Ministry, Cairo Governorate, private-sector actors, civil society, and Khalifa residents and craftspeople, the conclusion was clear: children growing up in one of Cairo’s most historically significant districts had almost no relationship with the heritage around them. Changing that became the first priority.

In late 2012, Megawra partnered with the government-run Shagarat El Durr School — located directly across from Ibn Tulun Mosque. The irony that prompted the collaboration: students walked past one of Cairo’s most significant historic mosques every day without ever going inside, and had never visited the adjacent Gayer-Anderson Museum. “The main driver in designing the curriculum was our desire for children to enter these heritage sites, to learn about them through play and enjoyment, to feel as though they were on an adventure,” Adel says. The school allocated two weekly periods for fourth and fifth graders on the history of the district and its monuments.

Treasure hunt: Alongside classroom sessions, children divided into teams to search for specific architectural elements at the mosque, discussed their functions, then assembled parts of a written story which they performed in short theatrical scenes. They learned to make plaster and glass — crafts the mosque is historically known for — staged a play, and built a paper model of the mosque’s courtyard dome.

When restoration work on the mosque began, children showed up in large numbers asking to watch. The team took note. What started as a limited school activity became, in 2014, a three-month summer school with 24 children — drawing on team members’ skills across music, visual arts, and origami to build heritage curricula specific to the area. The session closed with an exhibition for families.

The summer camp has run annually ever since, for children aged 7-13, with more than 100 participants each year across 12 editions reaching more than 1k children. Since 2018, it has expanded to include programs for older age groups, keeping the relationship alive with those who have aged out of the original camp.

Restoration history

The initiative’s first restoration project in 2013 was the dome of Shagarat El Durr — neglected at the time. Work expanded gradually to the domes of Sayyida Ruqayya and Al Jaafari, before Megawra took on its largest project to date: the Imam Al-Shafi’i dome complex, a five-year, multi-phase undertaking with the Antiquities Ministry and donor funding. The organization’s heritage preservation and consolidation work now spans 12 projects in total, including seven officially registered monuments and five historic buildings.

The work repeatedly turned up surprises. During the cleaning of the Shagarat El Durr dome, rare green decorative units were found buried under layers of white paint — requiring a second round of funding. Excavations addressing floor subsidence at the Imam Al-Shafi’i complex uncovered the remains of an earlier historic dome beneath the current one, opening a new archaeological phase. Marble facades, enclosures, and a distinctive wooden dome all underwent restoration.

The most operationally complex challenge was groundwater. Two mausoleums — those of Safi Al Din Gohar and Yahya Al Shabeeh — were effectively submerged. The team developed a system to lower the water table and drain it, installing five groundwater collection and harvesting systems that now recycle more than 2,000 cubic meters of water annually. The environmental impact has extended further: 18 urban greening projects have been completed, around 4,870 square meters of new green space created, and 10 rooftop farms established across buildings in the Khalifa district. The experience later inspired the launch of a product line drawing on it.

From grants to revenue

By 2015/16, the team recognized that full dependence on donor funding was a structural vulnerability. They began building income-generating activities: guided tours of the district, and craft products inspired by the ornamentation of the buildings they had restored. In 2018, the initiative launched Nareng, a commercial brand whose products are now sold at Diwan bookstores, at Megawra’s Khalifa base, and online. The organization hasn’t reached full financial independence, but the revenue now covers part of the summer camp’s running costs and community programming, according to Adel.

Heritage as a community development tool

Many of the district’s tours are now led by trained residents. Craft Rules is presented by women from the area and covers traditional crafts including drum-making and mat-weaving. A separate tour focuses on folk storytelling. Summer-camp children lead tours of their own. The tours are also structured to feed back into the local economy — the initiative routes groups through craftspeople’s workshops, buys their products for use as gifts, and sources food and drinks from local shops. Over the years, over 199,000 people have benefited from the initiative’s various undertakings, according to Adel.

Every project begins with a field study of residents’ needs, with the explicit goal of giving them a stake in decision-making. The theory: residents who feel ownership over a space protect it. In practice, it has worked, generating self-initiated community action such as a women’s committee that organized a children’s clothing exchange in the district.

Not everything runs smoothly. Facade renovation projects have required the agreement of all residents in a building — which sometimes takes time. Megawra’s approach has been to resolve these through dialogue, drawing on over a decade of trust built in the district. Megawra is now 15 years old. Adel credits the organization’s continuity to one thing above all: its willingness to adapt — to administrative changes, shifting urban priorities, and the practical realities of working in a living neighborhood — without losing sight of the original mission.

The organization is currently preparing to represent Egypt at the 2026 Pan-African Biennial and is participating at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial to explore the role of environment and local community in heritage preservation practices. It has expanded into environmental work, including groundwater re-use in agriculture, and creative programming, such as natural fabric dyeing using plants grown on the rooftops of restored buildings. It publishes a regular documentation series — Megawra Papers — and runs the Patterns of Cairo project, which has documented more than 275 architectural patterns, to share what it has learned with similar initiatives elsewhere, while stressing that context matters: what works in Khalifa may not transfer directly to another heritage area without adaptation.