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Together Association for Development and Environment (TADE) is an Egyptian NGO and an umbrella foundation for 25 Community Development Associations in Minia, Baniswef, Fayoum and Kena. It focuses on economic development in rural communities in Egypt and is Kiva’s first partner in Egypt. Kiva funding will allow TADE to expand lending programs, targeting youth, self-employed female entrepreneurs and self-employed or underemployed men.

Due to political unrest and insecurity, socioeconomic conditions in Egypt continue to deteriorate: the unemployment rate among youth has reached 39% and rural-urban income disparities are widening.
 
TADE's founder, Sameh Seif Ghali, has earned recognition from multiple international foundations and organizations as a social innovator and leader in development in the Arab world. This recognition came thanks to TADE's work establishing low-cost community sewage treatment systems in underserved villages. TADE also runs youth empowerment programs, housing improvement programs, microfinance programs and composting programs. 

TADE actively engages the community in the design and installation of the system, hiring homemakers, unemployed youth and other members of the local community and training them to construct and maintain this system. This not only guarantees that the system meets the needs of each village, but also generates a sense of ownership and confidence among villagers, motivating them to undertake other collective projects.

Through TADE, Ghali also created a network of grass roots organizations to advocate wider adoption of the model to other villages and to lobby to policymakers. Ghali’s goal is to spread this system throughout Egypt and to establish a new Egyptian Sanitation Network. In the long term, TADE aims to grow and expand its model beyond Egypt to achieve broad reach throughout the rural Middle East.

A unique lending approach:

TADE offers microlending programs targeting women and youth in the “poorest of the poor” villages in Upper Egypt, which is the area around the Nile River that is south of the delta. The organization provides group loans to female entrepreneurs to support agriculture and livestock businesses as well as individual loans to youth to support microenterprises and handicraft businesses.