Saniyya was married at 14 years old. Thirteen years later, her husband abandoned and eventually divorced her, went to prison for a month rather than pay her alimony and has since disappeared without trace.

Now 38, she is about to see her 20-year-old daughter Sanaa go through a similarly painful experience. Sanaa has been married for three years, has a 16-month-old daughter and is two months pregnant.

"He's a bad man," Saniyya says of her son-in-law. She pauses for a few seconds and bursts into tears as she recalls her daughter's plight. "He threw Sanaa out and vowed she'd never see their daughter again. She doesn't know what to do."

A small organisation in Saniyya's neighbourhood that gives loans to women who have been abandoned by their husbands told her to go to the Centre for Egyptian Women's Legal Assistance (CEWLA). The pioneering project has turned the call for women's rights into the reality of legal aid.

A study of the area surrounding the centre revealed that women are the main breadwinners for 25 per cent of families. Such figures reflect national trends, which show that a couple is divorced every six minutes in Egypt. According to CEWLA, 2m women were divorced in 1997, a 500 per cent increase in 10 years.

The centre, located in a dilapidated building in the Cairo district of Boulaq al-Dakrour, was set up in 1996 by two lawyers, Azza Soliman and Yasser Abdel-Gawad, to offer free legal aid to women. Women are helped to cover the cost of divorce, issuance of birth certificates, identification papers and applications for state pensions for divorced women and widows.

"We felt it was important to have legal awareness and support. No one was doing this," says Ms Soliman, the centre's executive director. The centre, funded by donations from foreign non-governmental organisations and some foreign embassies in Cairo, has since inspired others to set up similar projects.

"These were among the many important topics for civil society that were brought to light by the (United Nations) women's conference in Beijing in 1995," Ms Soliman says. In the run-up to that conference and the UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, a host of NGOs sprang up in Egypt, many of them concerned with women's welfare.

Often, the organisations were accused of being founded by educated, privileged women, to serve their own kind. They issued one stinging survey after another, bemoaning violations of women's rights in Egypt but went largely unnoticed by the very women whose rights needed the most attention.

"We wanted to open the centre in an area that really needed it," says Abeer Ali Mohammed, a lawyer with CEWLA's legal services department. "Boulaq has a very high level of illiteracy and many women don't have basic official documents such as birth certificates and identification cards. They really needed us here."

s Mohammed says the centre's services include helping women deal with official documents. Most of the women who come to the centre, though, have problems related to the personal status law, which covers mainly family issues such as divorce, alimony and inheritance and child custody.

Divorce is one of the hardest legal procedures for women in Egypt. Under the 70-year-old personal status law, a man can divorce his wife by saying the phrase "I divorce you" three times. A woman must petition a court for a divorce, which can often take years.

Women's activists have long complained that the law gives women less rights than is provided for in the Islamic sharia, the basis of the law, and have urged the government to push for change. A draft bill aimed at simplifying and shortening court procedure is now due to go before parliament.

The CEWLA provides lawyers free of charge for women. It also operates a legal assistance hotline, operated by lawyers who suggest the best course of action to follow, for both women, and occasionally men, who seek advice. The men in Boulaq seem to have taken to the centre with surprising ease. Ms Soliman attributes this to the centre having done plenty of field work during its early days, and little inflammatory sloganeering now.

In Sanaa's case, the centre plans to try and resolve things amicably. If that fails, it will ask Sanaa's husband to divorce her. If he refuses, CEWLA will appoint one of it's lawyers to raise a divorce case on behalf of Sanaa.

"We tell the women: 'We'll stand by you, take your hand, we don't want any money and we'll try as best as we can to change that law'," says Wahid Dessouki, a CEWLA social worker.


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