At a high-profile conference of the Human Development Report (HDR) held in Cairo last month, the government promised to build "a new social contract" with the object of achieving the UN- devised Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and greater social equilibrium by 2015. This would seem to bode well for a country in which the poor and impoverished are far from provided for. Poverty aside, however, the discussion covered women, sanitation, the environment, governance and democracy; speakers ranged from head HDR writer Heba Handoussa and head of the National Democratic Party Policies Committee Gamal Mubarak, to Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif and Cairo University economists. The principal drive being sustainable development, the contract discourse is reminiscent of NDP reformism, with the inclusion of the mass majority of Egyptians in global markets in view. Governmental attendees pledged to work on reforming economic and political conditions, with Nazif, for example, insisting that the relationship between people and state has already started to change, jokingly adding that the object is to achieve such levels of cooperation, responsibility and unity as those witnessed at the recent 25th African Cup of Nations. But the figures remain disheartening, particularly with regard to the margins of society. One interesting trend laid out in the HDR points to the percentage of those living below the lower poverty line in Upper Egypt is no less than 34.9 per cent, compared to 5.7 per cent for metropolitan areas. Yet in the latter areas the percentage of people living below the upper poverty line is as high as 42.5 per cent. The report underlined the shortcomings of existing social structures. The quality of free primary education, for example, is such that 58 per cent of students require private tuition to pass the government-set exams, burdening family incomes. Likewise some two-thirds of Egyptians surveyed by the HDR expressed dissatisfaction with the public health system. And notwithstanding the genuine good intentions of the speakers, concerns persist on a number of levels. The very premise of alleviating poverty by co-opting more and more people into global enterprise is unsettling in the light of the tendency of free market economies -- evident across Latin America and South Asia -- to turn the poor into cheap labour.
