Sameh Suleiman already had three children aged between eight and 12 when his wife decided last year that she wanted another baby.
“I agreed because we had only one boy and two girls, so we wanted another boy,” said Mr Suleiman, a Cairo newspaper seller who makes around $200 in a good month. “We now have a new baby boy, and it is just our luck that he came at a moment of very high prices.”
Egyptians prefer large families, but they come with significant economic costs for both parents and the country. In an effort to rein in the galloping birth rate, the Egyptian government has launched a family planning programme named “Two Are Enough”.
The authorities want to convince millions of people like Mr Suleiman and his wife that if they have fewer children they would be able to offer them a better life as well as ease the burden on the state, which is struggling to meet the rising demand for jobs and services.
“A child is born every 15 seconds and we add 2.5m babies every year,” said Amr Othman, assistant minister of Social Solidarity. “Think of what this means in terms of additional school places, hospital beds, vaccinations and all the other rights of children.”
Egypt’s population hit 98m in December and Mr Othman said it would rise by another 20m over the next decade if the birth rate did not fall. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has described population growth along with terrorism as the biggest threats facing the country.
The family planning programme involves poster campaigns, television advertising, home visits by social workers and clinics handing out contraceptives. The government has also decided to stop disbursing some benefits to poor families beyond the second child. The aim, said Mr Othman, is to reduce the fertility rate from 3.5 children per woman to 2.4 by 2030. Meeting that target would mean 8m fewer births over the next decade.
Despite economic growth that reached 5.5 per cent in 2018, Egypt has failed to generate the more than 800,000 jobs needed every year just to absorb new entrants to the labour market. Macroeconomic indicators have improved and the country has been praised by the IMF for reforms.
But most Egyptians struggle to survive on small incomes as the government cuts subsidies and prices soar. Unemployment stands at 10 per cent and it is more than double that level for the young. Faltering services, such as health and education, need massive investments just to cope with current demand, let alone the pressures of a rapidly expanding population, analysts said.
Angus Blair, chief operating officer of Pharos Investments, a Cairo-based investment bank, said: “Further stress is coming because of the major population bulge on the way given the population growth.” Mr Blair warned that Egypt faced problems, “including the limited availability of water and issues of food security. It will also have to deal with these challenges in the context of climate change”.
Egypt has already run a successful family planning programme, which helped reduce the birth rate to 3.1 children per woman in 2008 from 5.6 in 1976. But when the programme, funded by the US, expired in 2008, the birth rate started climbing again. Officials say population growth accelerated faster after the 2011 revolution when government was in disarray and Islamists became, for a while, a more assertive political force.
The US government, along with other international donors, is again supporting the new programme with about $20m. Nahla Abdel Tawab, director of the Egypt office of the Population Council, an international research organisation, said it was important to ensure “sustainability” of the programme so that fertility rates did not rise again as soon as funding dried up. That, she argued, could be achieved through integrating family planning information in secondary schools because some girls marry immediately after they finish school.
But in a conservative country, the government has been wary about teaching sex education. “This is not sex education,” Dr Abdel Tawab argued. “Schools have to talk about family planning, the benefits of a small family and the health risks of closely spaced pregnancies and early childbearing. Pupils should be told that there are contraceptive methods they can use when they get married. More than 60 per cent of adolescent boys and girls do not know about birth control methods.”
Dr Abdel Tawab also argued that expanding female employment was crucial to reducing the birth rate, as was teaching gender equality so that families with daughters did not keep trying for a son.
A big family with many sons is a source of pride and in some rural areas children provide extra hands on farms, researchers say. Arguing that parents should have fewer children so that they can be better educated is often undermined by the fact that university graduates struggle to find jobs while the informal economy has absorbed many unskilled workers.
For Mr Suleiman, government efforts, including the curtailment of benefits after the second child, are not convincing. He remains sanguine about his family’s prospects.
“By all means everything is expensive and what the government gives us is very little,” he said. “They can increase the pressure on me, but income is something that God provides.”
