Egypt has been working hard to contain its population growth, with the government warning repeatedly that the unrestrained increase in the number of births would render the growth of the national economy ineffective. [Getty]
In 2024, there were 164,028 newborns in Egypt every month, 5,378 every day, 224 every hour, 3.73 every minute and one every 16 seconds.
Even with these dramatic figures, there was a marked drop in the number of newborns at the national level in this country in the same year.
In 2024, the number of newborns registered across Egypt dropped to less than 2 million, for the first time in 17 years, the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statics (CAPMAS), the research arm of the Egyptian government, said earlier this month.
It added that there were 1.96 million new Egyptians in this year, a decline of 3.8 percent from 2023 figures.
The Egyptian government hails this drop as an achievement and a proof of the success of its family planning programmes and campaigns, noting that this is the lowest birth rate registered in the country since 2007.
In 2014, Egypt registered 2.7 million new births, a far cry from the 2024 figure and a demonstration of the long way Egypt has gone in reducing the number of births in it and consequently reining in its uncontrollable population growth.
Egypt’s runaway population growth has been a pain in the head for successive governments ever since this growth has started accelerating rapidly after the 1970s.
With 117.6 million people, including over 9 million refugees, Egypt is Africa’s third most populous country after Nigeria and Ethiopia, and the world’s 13th most populous nation.
In the last ten years, Egypt’s population grew by almost 22 million, more than the populations of Sweden and Greece combined and larger than the total populations of Bulgaria; Denmark; Finland, and Croatia.
In September 2023, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi considered the uncontrollable population growth to be the most serious challenge facing his country.
On February 5, Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouli attributed the drop in the number of newborns to the efforts made by the government in regard to family planning and the spread of awareness about the importance of reducing family sizes.
“Egyptians have started to realise the importance of regulating the growth of the population,” the prime minister said, following the weekly cabinet meeting.
He expressed optimism that his country’s conditions would be much better, if the current population growth trend continues for ten more years.
Hard work
Egypt has been working hard to contain its population growth, with the government warning repeatedly that the unrestrained increase in the number of births would render the growth of the national economy ineffective.
The Egyptian president complained several times in the past ten years that his country’s people would fail to reap the fruits of economic growth so long as the population was growing at over 1.5 percent a year.
To hold back the growth of the population, the government launched a series of initiatives, all aiming at convincing the members of the public to have fewer children.
In 2023, the government launched the National Population and Development Strategy which lasts until 2023.
The strategy aims to ensure that Egyptians have access to health services and own the knowledge to make informed decisions about their sexual and reproductive health.
In 2018, the Egyptian government launched the Two are Enough campaign which aimed to reduce poverty by pulling in the number of births per each family.
The campaign especially targeted women in Egypt’s ten poorest governorates, which also had the nation’s highest fertility rates.
Five of the same ten governorates, namely Assuit, Sohag, Qena, Minya and Beni Sueif, in southern Egypt, continue to have the highest fertility rates, accounting for almost 45% of all the new births registered in 2024, according to CAPMAS.
Nonetheless, the government is hopeful that its family planning campaigns will achieve more successes, including in these governorates, in the coming years.
“Our family planning campaigns aim to strike a balance between population growth and the growth of the economy,” Dr Hossam Abdelghaffar, the official spokesman of the Ministry of Health and Population, told The New Arab.
“These campaigns are starting to show positive results that can be seen in figures about new births,” he added.
He noted that the Ministry of Health and Population would use all tools available in the coming period to rein in the population growth, with a view to reducing the national fertility rate to 2.01 children per woman by 2030, from 2.41 children per woman now and 2.54 children per woman in 2023.
Nevertheless, to maintain the downward trend in the growth of its population, Egypt faces a number of challenges, observes said.
These challenges include school abandonment as a phenomenon, especially in relation to girls in the Egyptian countryside.
In 2022, around 68,600 female and make pupils dropped out of primary and preparatory schools around the nation.
School abandonment is strongly linked with the marriage of minor girls, a phenomenon rife in the Egyptian countryside, one that is also connected with women giving birth to numerous children.
Drawbacks
Outside government offices, there is belief that other reasons stand behind the decision of Egyptian families to have fewer children.
These reasons include the rising cost of living and rampant poverty, which make Egyptians incapable of sustaining large families.
The government provides the members of the public with free health and education services.
Nonetheless, high demand creates huge pressure on these services, making it tower above them in a deplorable manner.
It is not clear also how and when the drop in the number of births and consequently the population growth, especially in the light of the latest rise in the number of deaths, will positively affect the economy or when ordinary Egyptians will start to feel the effect of this drop on their daily lives.
In 2024, there were 610,000 mortalities in Egypt, compared to 583,000 in 2023, which accounts for an increase of 4.4 percent in overall mortalities.
There is, meanwhile, speculation about the possible effects of the slide in the population growth on Egypt in the long term.
This comes amid belief among some of the nation’s economists that Egypt does not suffer from a population growth that is not commensurate with the size of this country’s economy or its economic resources.
Instead of working to rein in the growth of its population, the people harbouring this view say, Egypt should work to make good use of its growing population in ways that benefit the economy.
In a way, this view is based on Egypt‘s age structure. In 2023, for example, 32.44 percent of Egyptians fell within the age group from 0 to 14 years old, whereas 62.6 percent of the population fell within the age group from 15 to 64 years old.
If it means anything, this age structure means that the vast majority of Egyptians are still in their most productive years, experts said.
“This population growth can be used to boost national development and push economic growth forward, especially with most Egyptians in their most productive years,” independent economist, Walid Gaballah, told TNA.
“However, to make this population growth benefit the economy, the government needs to improve education to ensure that those joining the labour market every year have the skills needed in this market,” he added.
