Helwa ya Balady Campaign

"We can't change the past but we can control the future"     

 

 

"Helwa ya Baladi " is getting to be one of the most influential social initiatives. the campaign is all about giving Environmental classes especially for children in kindergarten stage who are more flexible to learn and are easily to be changed, in-order to have a clean, healthy environment. The campaign is a graduation project that was held by a group of Advertising and PR students at MSA University: Jayda Amr Saleh, Bassant Okasha, Engy Samaha, Eman Gharieb, Kholoud El Masry, Nashwa Rafaat.

 

"Recently we had the swine flew crises and it resulted in increasing the garbage problem that we are living in Egypt. We chose 'Helwa Ya Balady' to trigger people's patriotism as Egypt is a full package country that has everything from best people, language, culture, history, food, the River Nile; everything!  It has a way of getting into your blood" Jayda Amr, one of the master minds behind the campaign tells us.

Demographic information indicates that the total amount of solid wastes in Egypt is approximately 20 million tons annually, which means that the daily amount of solid wastes is 55,000 tons according to the ministry of the environment, and that inspired the creators of the campaign to organize a PR campaign representing the effect of cleaning environment by increasing awareness introducing hygiene classes for children in private schools.

"We're targeting children from upper and middle class that already have a basic hygiene knowledge, and their parents care about them and about their health and they are going to help us by implementing what we taught them at home first of all they must have a basic hygiene steps otherwise he's not going to be able to learn nor to understand" Jayda tells us.  The basic lessons that the campaign teaches to children are the following:

·         To love their country 

·         To teach our future youth that loving Egypt is a must because Egypt deserves.

·         We are all raised in this country and we have to work on improving it.

·         It has to be our priority.

·         They just have to learn to clean it up and to keep it beautiful.

·         To teach them the steps of environmental hygiene. ( not to threw anything in the road ,keep their wastes until reaching the garbage trash)

'Helwa Ya Balady' took place by visiting private schools in Cairo, making focus groups with children and interviews with teachers and parents about their kids. They visited the Ministry of Environment where they had interviews with many of the ministry's representatives for taking rough statistics about our target. "We presented them our work and they were thrilled with our ideas. They showed us the previous campaigns and we were the first campaign to think about it in this way and they gave us some advices, and there is other campaign with which we share the same goals will going to cooperate with us for a better future".

The campaign is working on the plan and the strategy for this semester and will going to implement starting from January 2011."We're planning to increase the awareness by using lovable Egyptian cartoon characters series to add new environmental ideas to the script, because the cartoons have a huge influence on kids, and we are going to organize an event in EL Azhar Park, where there will be free games and environmental sessions in a different fun way".  

 For more updates, check out the Facebook group 'Helwa Ya Balady'.