Pipes but no water: A need grows in Egypt

The women line up at a well, jugs in hand and on their heads, to draw water. It is a pastoral scene celebrated in paintings and in Middle Eastern lore from ancient times.

This tableau, however, is in a treeless alley in 21st-century Cairo, the biggest city in Africa. As the Nile River flows abundantly by to the east, residents in the Saft al-Laban neighborhood carry out a ritual of desperation, not tradition.

Forty percent of Cairo's 17 million inhabitants get drinking water for no more than three hours a day, according to the Egyptian government's National Research Center. At least four large districts receive no water at all from the municipal system, including a swath of Saft al-Laban, home to 100,000 people.

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