Redesigning Waste, Reimagining Futures
How a Young Engineer is Leading Grassroots Climate Action in Rural Egypt
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In a quiet, rural village in Sharqia, Egypt, a young man bends over a pile of plastic pellets, once discarded jerrycans and bottle caps. To many, they appear to be nothing more than ordinary waste. For Ahmed Ashraf, a 25-year-old electrical engineering graduate, they are building blocks of transformation.
“I see plastic not as trash, I see it as raw potential, for jobs, for cleaner villages, for hope.”
What Ahmed is doing goes far beyond recycling. It’s about rethinking what we throw away and what we believe is possible. It’s about shifting mindsets, transforming waste into opportunity, and inspiring a new vision for what rural communities can achieve.
From Waste to Transformatio,
Ahmed’s journey began with a simple, uncomfortable truth: rural Egypt’s growing waste problem wasn’t going away on its own. Piles of plastic littered fields and alleys. Open burning filled the air with toxins. And yet, people felt powerless.
What if plastic waste could become the foundation for local solutions and shared purpose?
He started small, rallying youth in his village, organizing door-to-door campaigns, and teaching households to separate their waste. What began as a humble local effort soon spread across 13 villages, evolving into a grassroots movement driven by climate awareness, circular economy practices, and everyday leadership.
But Ahmed wasn’t content with awareness alone.
UNICEF/Egypt 2025/Ahmed ُEmad
I didn’t want to just talk about change, I wanted people to feel this change and to be able to hold it in their hands.
Scaling with Support
In 2024, Ahmed’s vision took a leap forward when he joined the Meshwary programme, supported by UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited and the Education Above All (EAA) Foundation’s ROTA programme.
The programme offered life skills, employability training, social innovation tools, and mentorship, helping Ahmed channel his passion into sustainable impact.
With this support, Ahmed launched organized collection drives, trained residents in waste segregation, and built a team of local youth to lead recycling efforts. Over 600 kilograms of polyethylene plastics, bottle caps, detergent containers, and more, were collected, shredded, cleaned, and converted into reusable pellets.
These were then repurposed into locally made products, such as keychains, small items carrying a big message: waste has value.
A Movement Takes Root
Ahmed’s project did more than reduce plastic pollution, it helped change mindsets. Parents, teachers, and young people began to see waste not as a nuisance, but as a resource. An opportunity to learn, to earn, and to care for their environment.
Through an internship with Heliopolis University’s Rural Development Centre, Ahmed deepened his technical expertise and outreach. His project introduced a “waste-for-value” concept, offering small incentives or products in exchange for household waste, and sparked youth-led innovations across participating villages.
At a village summer camp, students replicated Ahmed’s methods – turning food waste into compost and plastic into simple agricultural tools. For many, it was the first time they saw themselves as part of the climate solution.
The most rewarding part was seeing young people come up with their own recycling ideas. Small projects that create big awareness.
Reimagining the Future
Now, Ahmed is building a low-cost recycling machine to expand local production of everyday goods from recycled plastic. His ambition is to bring sustainable recycling, and the mindset shift that comes with it, to every rural village in Egypt.
“Don’t let challenges stop you,” he says to other young changemakers. “Start with what you have, where you are. Be the change your environment needs.”
A Model for Youth Climate Leadership
Ahmed’s story is a powerful example of what happens when young people are equipped with the tools, training, and trust to lead. Thanks to the collaboration between UNICEF's Generation Unlimited and EAA Foundation’s ROTA programme, initiatives like Ahmed’s are redefining what youth leadership looks like in the face of climate crisis.
In Ahmed’s hands, a plastic bottle cap is a symbol of resilience, creativity, and a cleaner tomorrow. One recycled item at a time, a new future is being shaped by youth, for their communities, and for the planet.
About
Meshwary, a UNICEF-supported youth development programme under the auspices of the Prime Minister, Dr. Mostafa Madbouly, is led by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, and funded by development partners including the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and Education Above All (EAA) Foundation. The programme aims to promote the socio-economic empowerment of young people through a comprehensive skills package that includes life and employability skills, innovation and social entrepreneurship training, and career guidance services, all designed to enhance youth employability and skilling.
The Green Visions and Thriving Futures programme of Education Above All (EAA) Foundation in partnership with UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited will support 370,000 young people across Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt in greening actions to protect biodiversity, manage waste and conserve water in local communities, with 60,000 of them undergoing a climate action curriculum in preparatory schools. In addition, the programme will support 195,670 youth in Egypt to transition from learning to earning through job placements or self-employment in sectors such as information technology, healthcare, engineering, and agriculture. This includes 22,500 young people who will first learn about climate action through the curriculum, then gain hands-on experience by participating in greening initiatives, and then access job opportunities.
