Al-Ahram Weekly | Economy | Steps to prosperity

		11 - 17 July 2002 Issue No. 594 Economy	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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Steps to prosperity
Another UN report shows that Egypt is potentially on track in meeting international development goals. Al-Ahram Weekly peruses the facts and figures

In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit held at UNDP headquarters in New York, Egypt joined other governments worldwide in adopting the Millennium Declaration, by which they committed themselves to attaining a series of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the year 2015. These goals, writes Gihan Shahine, focus on reducing to half extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education for boys and girls, reducing child mortality, promoting gender equality and empowering women. Improving maternal health, reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development are also on the agenda.
The UN country team in Egypt recently held a seminar to review and discuss the findings of the MDG baseline country analysis. The good news, the report found, was that Egypt has made significant progress towards achieving the MDGs and is potentially on track on all of them.
The picture, however, is not all that bright. Progress to date, the report said, has been somewhat uneven. While there was fast and sustained progress in areas like child and maternal mortality, curbing malaria and other diseases, advances were slower in important areas like poverty reduction, education, gender empowerment and the environment.
Poverty in Egypt has fallen from 25 per cent in 1990 to 20 per cent in 2000 and, the report said, is projected to fall still further to 13 per cent by 2015. But even if the reduction is achieved, warns the report, roughly 10 to 12 million people will remain unable to satisfy their basic food and non-food requirements.
UN resident coordinator and UNDP resident representative Antonio Vigilante expressed his concern about poverty's unequal grip on the country. The UN report reveals uneven distribution of developmental activities, serious rural-urban dichotomies, as well as problems faced by Upper Egypt in both rural and urban areas.
During the seminar, Vigilante warned that the real danger is that "a two-tier Egypt may emerge over the next 20 years." Social improvement in Upper Egypt -- where poverty is worst -- may be slower and less tangible than in the rest of the country, unless government policies target assistance to these disadvantaged areas. And, despite the marked fall in poverty levels in Egypt's rural areas as opposed to its urban centres, the report reveals that rural households still live in traditional village housing lacking running water and modern toilets, besides being overcrowded by large-sized families.
The study further shows that 40 per cent of the poor receive only 22 per cent of the national income. Women constitute 70 per cent of the poor and an estimated 20 per cent of women-headed households are categorised as poor.
Unemployment is largely blamed for the high incidence of poverty in Egypt, the report says. More than 40 per cent of the population consists of young people seeking employment. There are 600,000 new graduates entering the market every year. The employment scheme adopted by the government prior to the economic reform programme in the early 1990s was discontinued and the private sector has failed, so far, to generate the promised bulk of new jobs. The external factors affecting tourism -- a major revenue source -- have played their role in constraining economic growth and increasing poverty.
On a more positive note, hunger, the report found, is not a serious problem in Egypt. The report shows that Egypt did attain progress towards achieving the nutrition goals adopted by the World Summit for Children for the year 2000. Per capita caloric intake has increased from 3,700 in 1990 to 4,258 in 2000. The proportion of underweight children fell from 10 per cent in 1990 to four per cent in 2000.
Apart from national efforts undertaken by the government in this respect, the prevailing culture in Egypt supports feeding the poor through "zakat", which explains why few people go hungry despite the high incidence of poverty.
The report, however, warns of Egypt's dependence on substantial quantities of food imports, as well as of the relatively high levels of malnutrition suffered by portions of the population in some regions. As well, there is a consensus that education is a key factor in reducing poverty and achieving MDGs. It is common knowledge that education helps the poor obtain higher paid jobs and that it supports progress in other areas, such as health and environmental awareness. The report also points to Egypt's progress in reducing illiteracy rates over the past years, cautioning that more effort needs to be exerted to attain universal enrollment in basic education.
Egypt's educational system has been successful in considerably reducing the total drop-out ratio in primary education from 4.3 per cent in 1992/93 to 1.5 per cent in 1997/8.
As for literacy rates, in 1992, almost half of all Egyptian adults were literate. By 1996, the literacy rate had risen to 56 per cent.
Nevertheless, Egypt still faces a major challenge in eradicating illiteracy. An estimated 22 per cent of Egyptian children aged between 12 and 15 are still unable to read or write. To eradicate illiteracy, the country should target four million illiterates per year at the cost of LE600 million. This means that an estimated LE20 million is needed to eradicate illiteracy over the next five years.
The required number of school buildings until 2002 has been estimated at 19,947, of which 7,500 were built during the period between 1992 and 1997 at a cost of LE6.8 billion. However, the report makes clear that rather than reducing the absolute numbers of illiterate people, the real challenge remains that of improving the quality of education itself, manifested in syllabuses, teaching methods and school facilities.
The report also emphasises that removing the gender gaps in education should be made a national priority, since women constitute the majority of illiterate people in Egypt. Official statistics indicate that female illiteracy stands at 46 per cent (cited as 57 per cent in the 2001 UN Human Development Report). The economic participation rate is 22 per cent for females and 79 per cent for males, while unemployment amongst women is almost 20 per cent.
The report as a whole provides a baseline survey of what may be considered the key social measures for improving the livelihoods of the majority of Egyptians by the year 2015. It should help in the formulation of policies, especially since it was produced in parallel with the finalisation of the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) for the years 2002-2006.
On a final note, though, Vigilante warned that the report was "prepared with the simplest methodological and statistical approach".
While averages give a sense of overall progress, he said, they can be misleading. The UN country team will purport to go beyond the average while tracking progress in future reports.

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