CAIRO: A United Nations report has said that Egypt's greatest obstacles to a better future lie in the abject poverty and poor educational system in the country. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) issued its 11th report in a series of reports on human development in Egypt by a team of freelance multidisciplinary writers, including a number of Egyptian researchers and experts, headed by Heba Handoussa, the main author of the report and details the current situation facing Egypt. The report was prepared by the UNDP in collaboration with the Institute of National Planning. The launch of the report “Youth in Egypt: the builders of the future” comes along with the start of International Youth Year declared by the United Nations, which will begin on August 12 under the slogan “dialogue and mutual understanding.” The first part of the report deals with the difficulties faced by young people and concludes that there is a set of interlocking constraints hinder young people's transition to adulthood include: “First, the deteriorating state of education in Egypt, where 27 percent of young people in the age group (18-29 years old) have not completed basic education (17 percent dropped out of school and 10 percent have never attended education), as well as low quality of education, and the incompatibility of output education with the requirements of the labor market, where this leads to overcrowding and a shortage of qualified teachers, and traditional approaches that do not develop the ability to solve problems and graduate young people who are not adequately prepared to the requirements of the labor market in a world of competition in the light of globalization,” the report details. In addition to economic and social situation, where nearly 20 percent of the population were classified within “poor groups” that have difficulty in school, the report said that “especially girls in poor families had high rates of non-enrollment, especially in rural areas (80 percent), and where female make at least 82 percent of those not enrolled in education.” The most important constraints, report says is poverty. “There is a strong correlation between the lack of permanent jobs and poverty, as the impoverished youth accept any available job, whether temporary or seasonal, as way out of poverty … [they] cannot afford to stay long in waiting for a rewarding formal job that has much permanence, which is an effective way to get young people out of poverty.” Unemployment also dominated the report, where it said youth unemployment is the “dominant feature of the form of unemployment in Egypt and constitutes the most serious types of exclusion of youth, as around 90 percent of those unemployed are under the age of 30-years-old.” On family-building, the report said that early marriage is primarily a rural phenomenon in Egypt, where 70 percent of rural females in the age group 15-21-years-old were married before the age of 18 and 93 percent of married males of the same age group, whereas delayed marriage is an urban phenomenon, and there are two factors behind this phenomenon: “the lack of employment opportunities and increased costs of marriage.” Housing, where the expected increase in construction costs are likely to be a difficult challenge to balance any program for low-income housing in the coming years, since most support programs are associated with levels of certain income and price targets for the units, and, accordingly, “it is the government that bears the burden of bridging the gap of support currently provided for the National Housing Program.” On the other hand, the report identified 9 recommendations to improve the situation of young people within the framework of an integrated approach that includes appropriate policies and investments and programs led by political and administrative elites in Egypt in partnership with civil society organizations. First, to overcome the failure of the education system, in order to achieve compatibility between the educational system and labor market requirements along with the development of technical education as well as linking literacy efforts to provide financial support to families conditional. “Breaking the cycle of poverty through a package of interventions that include job training and small projects for income-generating and give young people a key role through volunteer work in the national projects aimed at poverty eradication, such as the National Project for the Development of thousands of poorer villages.” Third, the report called for a reward system and real jobs “in the administrative system and in the small enterprise sector, through a wage subsidy for new youth jobs through the government's contribution to payment of social security.” It also said that there should be a focus on promoting a culture of “innovation and creativity among young people to allow [them] to find new and innovative solutions to current problems, as well as restoring a culture of tolerance and respect for others and openness to world cultures.” Likewise, it added that the elimination of discrimination linked to gender is necessary in the country “through the adoption of a series of legislative interventions, with regard to social participation/economic development through expansion of three projects with vital influence on girls and young women, namely: pre-school education, and one-class schools for girls and conditional cash transfers.” The report comes as the Egyptian government continues to highlight the roughly five percent annual economic growth in the country, despite the rise in poverty and lack of adequate education. BM
