VeryNile: Cleaning the Nile One Trash Bag at a Time

By: Aya Aboshady

@Aya_Abuchadiee

With their blue shirts, gloves, boots and large trash bags, young women and men patrol the River Nile in a boat to collect garbage and clean their immediate ecosystem as part of the new Egyptian environmental initiative, VeryNile.

Co-founded in July 2018 by Egyptian startups Greenish and Bassita, VeryNile is a community grown service that raises awareness of the importance of protecting and saving the environment. It’s the first ever initiative to focus on the Nile and removing trash from the river.

“We started by having the basic idea of wanting to clean the Nile. That’s when Greenish and Bassita combined forces and began talking to fishermen with boats and garbage collectors into removing trash from the nile in order to give it to those in Garbage City who do the recycling,” said Greenish Communication Officer Mariam Omar, 26.

Bassita and Greenish aim to design and implement sustainable environmental solutions to schools, NGOs, retails and restaurants, allowing entities to save money, create new revenue streams and attract environmentally conscious customers.

Through this partnership, VeryNile is helping two marginalized communities in Egypt – garbage collectors and fishermen – to get a profit margin while saving the environment at the same time.

“We get so many volunteer applications and we split them in groups and different locations, so every group would have a trained leader from VeryNile,” said VeryNile and Baseeta’s Project officer, Mona El Kateb, 23.

“Last event, we had children from Banaty’s association and refugees from the UNHCR who took part. We had over 800 volunteers from all ages, genders and places,” she said.

Banaty’s association is an Egyptian charitable foundation that provides education for street children and involves their parents in counselling sessions.

“When we’re in action, we always have bystanders and even the people who live in the  vicinity come up to us and find out about our activities. And that’s how we start informing them and spreading the word,” said Omar.

The key aspect of Verynile’s operations is sustainability, which requires that its volunteers check on the areas they’ve cleaned.

“But of course, the trash reappears and it’ll keep reappearing. Which is why our main aim is raising awareness and we do that through doing our best in cleaning up,” Omar said.

The Verynile volunteers also found it more effective to raise awareness on climate change, the dangers of plastic use and littering while on the job in clean-up operations than just holding lectures and workshops about it to spoonfeed the information.

“I have a strong belief that the more people join, the more they’ll see the amount of dangerous waste and therefore; start consuming more consciously and using less plastic for example,” said Greenish Goodwill Ambassador Mai El-Ghity, actress and AUC Psychology major, 20.

To date VeryNile have held three successful clean-ups in Cairo and one in Luxor.

The overall amount of trash that was removed came to 21 tons.

The initiative has already caught the attention of many partners and sponsors, including the UN Refugee Agency, the UN Migration Agency, Emirates NBD, the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, the New Zealand Embassy and more.

Omar explained that some of the people who take part in the cleanups are involved in environmental initiatives of their own, or are in need of material for recycling, and use this opportunity as a collaboration.

“Shady Rabab [winner of the United Nations Environment Programme “Champions of the Earth” competition] took part in our Luxor clean up event and collected some of the garbage we removed together in order to recycle them and create musical instruments,” said Omar.

Both Omar and El Kateb explained that  their goal for 2019 is to clean up the Nile in governorates outside Cairo.

This summer, Verynile is planning to visit Kafr El-Sheikh, Ras El Bar, Domyat, Marsa Matrouh, and as many coastal beaches as they can in order to expand their environmental awareness and clean ups project, with an eye on possible expansion to other regions of Africa.