“Egypt's population, including those living abroad, reached 94 million on Saturday,” the head advisor to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), Mohamed Abdel-Gelil, said in a call to state-owned television this week. According to a report issued by the statistics agency, Egypt's population has increased by a million people in less than six months. Thus, the number of people in Egypt, 85 million in August 2013, was 86 million on 22 February 2014. Along with estimates from the Foreign Ministry that show that eight million Egyptians live abroad, Egypt's total population at home and abroad reached 94 million people this week. Of these, 51.1 per cent are males, while 48.9 per cent are females. “In 2013, we also increased by two-and-half million births, an unprecedented rate internationally,” Abdel-Gelil said. Abu Bakar Al-Gendi, head of CAPMAS, said that Egyptian demographics were characterised by the fact that “one-third of Egyptians are illiterate, and there is a high rate of poverty. The 86 million will only turn into a blessing if we can provide people with a good level of education,” he said in a telephone interview with the CBC channel. “The increases mean that we are adding 5,606 people per day,” he added. “We are living through a worsening crisis because of the rapid increase in population,” Samia Khedr, head of the philosophy and sociology department at Ain Shams University in Cairo, said. “The news about the increases is being reported, but neither the authorities nor the mass media has any idea how to tackle the crisis.” Population growth rates in Egypt had risen recently, Al-Gendi said, especially during the curfew imposed in late 2013 when the birth rate had increased by one million in just six months. Khedr said that the political instability and the curfew had both played a role in boosting the population, though there were also other reasons. “The poorer areas have the highest birth rates, showing that population growth is directly linked to poverty and illiteracy,” Al-Gendi said. He added that there was a need for reinforced family planning in such areas. Almost 16 million Egyptians live in the country's 1,221 ashwaaiyat, or informal housing areas, which have developed in the absence of proper planning or even functional government. The Cairo governorate, the largest governorate in Egypt, has a population of 9.1 million people (10.6 per cent of the total population), followed by Giza with 7.4 million (8.6 per cent). In Cairo, about 63 per cent of the population lives in 81 informal areas, while in Giza there are 32 such areas. “In the informal areas one can easily find elderly men with more than eight children,” Khedr said, adding that there was a need to raise awareness of the problems such numbers could cause. According to a 2012 United Nations Population Fund report, Egypt's population is projected to increase to 121 million by 2050. “Such an increase will be a recipe for disaster,” Khedr warned. “Awareness programmes and birth-control policies must be developed in the meantime. In China, there was a one-child policy in place for 50 years. We should introduce something like it,” she concluded.
