Egypt has a large population of young people, a “youth bulge,” relative to other age groups. The statistics below are based on data in the annual report of the Population Council's Survey of Young People in Egypt, published in January 2011, the report of the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), published in 2014, and the Egypt Human Development Report, published by the UNDP in 2010. The youth population is primarily rural. About two-thirds of young people (58.9 per cent) live in rural areas, whereas one-third lives in urban areas (31.6 per cent) or informal urban areas (5.6 per cent). Most young people reside in either Lower Egypt (42.6 per cent) or Upper Egypt (34.2 per cent), whereas the urban governorates are home to only 21.4 per cent of young people. The frontier governorates are estimated to have 1.75 per cent of the country's young people. Egypt has 51 per cent young men and 49 per cent young women.
Employment: Young people constitute 70.8 per cent of the total unemployed. The majority of unemployed youth are in the 20 to 24 year-old tranche, 84.5 per cent of unemployed young people have high school or college degrees.
Literacy: 29.8 per cent of Egypt's young people are illiterate, and 15.2 per cent have difficulty reading and writing. The highest rates of illiteracy are found in Upper Egypt in Fayoum with 37 per cent, followed by Sohag and Minya.
Violence: The rate for physical and sexual violence among youth is 34 per cent. Some three per cent of young people have encountered police violence. Most (85.2 per cent) were men, while 79.4 per cent were 18 or older. Health: one quarter of adolescent males and one third of females in Egypt are anaemic. WHO studies have found that, of a total smoking population of six million in Egypt, about half a million are children. Some 15.5 per cent of smokers in Egypt will die of tobacco-related causes. Marriage: 25.4 per cent of Egypt's young women are married, as are 8.4 per cent of its young men. Media exposure: the percentage of young people exposed to at least one media source (newspaper, radio, television) at least once a week is 98.6 per cent for women and 99.4 per cent for men. Poverty: Egypt's poor are concentrated in rural areas, in Upper Egypt in particular. According to the Population Council's Survey of Young People in Egypt, whereas rural youth account for 59 per cent of Egypt's total youth. Equality: Egypt has one of the lowest female labour participation rates in the world and ranks 120 out of 128 countries in terms of the gender gap.
