Planning Ministry Reports on Egypt's Population and Family Development Plan 23/2024

The Ministry of Planning and Economic Development has issued a report on the targets of the current fiscal year plan 23/2024 in the field of population growth and development of the Egyptian family.

H.E. Dr. Hala El Said, Minister of Planning and Economic Development, emphasized that the population issue represents one of the most important developmental challenges facing the country, due to the negative impacts and economic and social pressures accompanying the rapid population growth resulting from the widening gap between population needs and the utilized economic resources. She explained that this leads to a decline in the individual's share of returns from development efforts and the fruits of economic growth. Therefore, the state is keen to make the main goal of the strategy for dealing with the population issue managing it from a comprehensive developmental perspective based primarily on enhancing population characteristics such as education, health, employment opportunities, economic empowerment, and culture, in addition to controlling population growth rates. She confirmed that adopting policies aimed at controlling population growth and improving the characteristics of the Egyptian family would enable providing more public facilities and social infrastructure services to citizens, reducing financial burdens on the state's general budget resulting from the inflation of public expenditure items, improving the quality of public services provided, and improving the environmental system by alleviating pollution, congestion, noise, disorderliness, and the deterioration of public facilities.

El Said mentioned the launch of the National Project for the Development of the Egyptian Family in February 2022, which included an executive plan based on five main axes: economic empowerment of women, encouraging them to establish small and micro-enterprises, providing necessary financing for that, service intervention by providing family planning methods and making them available for free, qualifying the necessary medical staff in health facilities nationwide, in addition to cultural, media, and educational intervention to raise awareness among citizens and correct misconceptions associated with the population issue and the social and economic consequences of population imbalance, as well as the digital transformation axis to build an integrated electronic system for monitoring, following up, and evaluating services provided to the Egyptian family, aiming to govern the project and ensure the delivery of services to beneficiaries, and legislative intervention to establish a governing legislative and regulatory framework for policies related to population growth to curb wrongful practices, in addition to incentivizing families to participate in the project by providing positive incentives, such as deferred insurance benefits for women who comply with the regulations, and other benefits related to visits to family development clinics and centers and adherence to regular check-ups.

In this context, El Said discussed the initiative proposed by the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development to provide performance incentives for the most distinguished governorates in managing the population issue, with the strategic goal of enhancing population characteristics and controlling population growth rates. The ministry allocated 1.5 billion Egyptian pounds for this initiative for the year 23/2024. She explained that incentives were granted to the best-performing governorates based on several criteria, including the effectiveness of controlling birth rates, marriage rates, reducing birth rates among the age group (15-19 years), reducing dropout rates from education, improving women's participation rates in the labor market, in addition to registration rates for population services on the Egyptian Family Development System.

El Said added that the plan for the year 23/2024 aims to reduce population growth rates to about 1.69% compared to the expected 1.72% for the year 22/2023, with continued decline to reach 1.64% by the end of 25/2026, which is expected to bring Egypt's population to about 108 million by the year 23/2024 and to about 111.6 million by the end of 25/2026.

From an economic perspective, the report of the Ministry of Planning explained that the importance of controlling population growth is manifested as an effective mechanism to ward off the consequences of rapid population growth, which include lower savings and investment levels, modest GDP growth rates, and per capita share of national income, growing inflationary pressures due to increasing consumer demand in markets and the inability of supply to keep up with continuous demand increases, as well as pressure on state general budgets, which witness increasing deficits due to increased subsidies to protect low-income groups, in addition to exacerbating problems of poverty and illiteracy, which are more severe in large-sized families, especially in rural areas, as well as problems of congestion in public facilities, increasing environmental pollution, and reducing the individual's share of agricultural land and green spaces.