Radwa Rostom is a civil engineer with a focus on sustainable construction. She has worked as a business development manager at WeForest, an organisation that seeks to tackle climate change through planting trees, since last August. In her previous role as a training and CSR specialist at Egypt’s Solar Energy Co, she worked with government, NGOs, donor agencies and international organisations to implement the company’s social development projects, in particular, initiatives to address lack of housing for poor communities in Cairo.
She is the founder of Hand Over, an independent social enterprise that aims to improve education, housing and healthcare in Cairo slums. Hand Over works with architecture and civil engineering students, graduates and local residents to jointly design and build sustainable and affordable homes for slum dwellers. Rostom first began to develop the idea in January 2014 when she was granted a fellowship from The DO School in Hamburg, Germany.
Since its inception, Hand Over has rebuilt a housing unit in the Abu-Qarn district with a team of 27 engineering students/graduates and a group of local residents. According to its website, the group used a technique called ‘rammed earth’, which compresses a damp mixture of earth into a supported frame. Rostom plans to expand the model to all slum areas across Egypt.
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