From a working single mom to a leading member of the ruling party, a pensioner to the country’s top business editor, we paint a portrait of what it means to be poor in Egypt —and what poverty could mean for the nation
By Manal el-Jesri
The true meaning of poverty was rammed home as I stood in our drafty garage talking to Omm Ahmed, our bawab’s wife. Shabrawi, her husband, had gone off to buy bread for the family. I asked if he had gone to the bakery next to the supermarket a few blocks down the street; after all, they sell perfectly good, fresh baladi bread for 40 piasters a piece. Not that expensive, you would say.

Omm Ahmed regarded me as if I was crazy. “Do you think we are going to spend all the money we make on bread? Shabrawi is in Arab El-Maadi, standing in line to get the five-piaster bread,” she chastised.

And chastised I was. I consider myself an empathetic person. I have been to and reported on slums and ‘poor’ districts for longer than I generally like to admit. I have interviewed people living six or seven to a room, people who make under LE 200 per month. But the very basic everyday image of what this really means never hit me so hard as when I had that enlightening chat with Omm Ahmed.

It’s enough to make you wonder about the state of poverty in Egypt. Granted, Egypt is a third-world or developing economy. Poverty is to be expected. But the figures tell you the country is moving in the right direction: There is economic growth — 7.1 percent last year. Foreign direct investment is pouring in — billions of dollars of it. The government has launched a vocational training program to fill some half a million unfilled jobs in industry.

But the people on the street have not felt the benefits of this growth. The channels through which affluence is supposed to trickle down to the average Egyptian are clogged, as one observer has described. Price increases are eating up whatever rise in wages some have seen, yet the World Bank insists poverty rates have stayed the same over the past 20 years.

So why is it that people seem more dissatisfied, more crushed under the weight of their struggle to secure their daily needs, their daily bread? This is the question we took to the following interested parties.

Poverty is not a uniform state, and the poor are not all alike. Different forms of poverty are measured with different poverty lines. — Arab Republic of Egypt Poverty Assessment Update, World Bank, 2007

AZZA HEMDAN | Civil Servant, Mother



The divorced mother of a 16-year-old daughter, Azza Hemdan has worked for the Giza Municipal Social Solidarity Sector for 12 years, earning exactly LE 240 a month. Since late January, she has tried to convince her colleagues to join her in a protest for a significant wage increase. Her model? The real-estate tax office employees who work in the same civil administration building as she and her friends. (For more on the real estate tax collectors’ strike, see page 42):

I live in a rented home, which costs me LE 500 per month. I take money from my mother and brothers just to make ends meet. I spend LE 3 for transport to and from work. I have to take three microbuses just to get to work. A friend of mine, who had lung cancer and lives with one lung, has to walk half the distance to and from work because she cannot afford to pay LE 3 everyday. Can you imagine what it is like to have to walk when you are as sick as that? She makes as much money as me, but has two kids and her husband does not work. She has to feed her family and get treatment for her cancer.

And not only is the salary not enough — prices keep increasing. In Ramadan, a bottle of oil cost LE 7; now it costs LE 10. Lentils were LE 4.50 a kilo; now they sell for LE 9.25. Artificial ghee, which used to cost LE 13, now costs LE 17.50. Chicken fillets sell for LE 29 a kilo, and live chicken sell for LE 13 a kilo. Rice today sells for LE 3. People cannot afford to eat anymore.

I am much better off than some of my friends. People are screaming. They are tired and fed up. We plan to protest every day. Egyptian government employees are dying a slow death, and no one can feel our pain.

With one in every five citizens falling behind the overall poverty threshold, poverty reduction remains a priority and a challenge for Egypt. —Arab Republic of Egypt Poverty Assessment Update, World Bank, 2007

DR. SHERINE SHAWARBY | Senior Economist, World Bank



We have to make one thing clear before we start talking about whether people are getting poorer or not: We have to clarify who are the poor. If you go to some people and ask them if they are poor, more people than we objectively see as poor will claim they are poor.

The definition depends on poverty lines. We have several poverty lines. The first is the line below which people cannot afford to have their minimum basic needs of food met — LE 980 per year. We call them the extreme poor. Then we have another poverty line below which people cannot afford to have their basic food needs and some of their basic service needs met, we call those poor — LE 1400 per year. There is a third, higher poverty line where people can have some basic food needs with a wider package of services. We call these near poor —LE 1800 per year.

In Egypt, according to the 2004-2005 Household Survey, which was published in the World Bank Poverty Assessment Report of September 2007, we had 3.8 percent of the population below the extreme poverty line, and 20 percent below the second poverty line, including the extreme poor. Another 20 percent fell below the third poverty line.

What is interesting is that you do not have a large proportion of the population as extreme poor — only 3.8 percent — but these deserve more attention than any other segment of the population.

Poverty in Egypt is not severe or deep. Moreover, we have four percent of the population around the poverty line, who keep moving up and down. These people are very sensitive. A shock in expenditures or an LE 5 increase in their income per month can change their position, driving them down or pulling them up. This means that poverty is shallow. Since we have no panel data whereby we survey the same people every five years, we cannot determine whether poverty is transient or permanent.

The thing is, the figure of 20 percent has not changed over the past 10 or 15 years. There are no structural changes in your poverty picture. Also, the percentage of near poor was 25.5 percent in 2000, and it decreased to 20 percent in 2005. This means that things must have happened in the time between 2000 and 2005 that increased the poor but decreased the near poor. The economic reforms must have provided this segment with some opportunities.

We also found out the poor are concentrated in the rural areas, more than 70 percent of them. Fifty percent of those are in rural Upper Egypt. The problem with these areas is that the villages are so distant and far apart which makes it difficult to reach out to them and help them.

With the weak infrastructure in those areas, it makes it much more costly to help them than it is to help the poor in Lower Egypt. What is really interesting is that in 2003 the United Nations Development Programme decided to do a subjective poverty assessment survey. Our survey is called objective, based on actual expenditures. The UNDP survey went house to house and asked people whether they perceived themselves as poor or not. The poverty rate turned out to be higher in metropolitan areas and Lower Egypt than in Upper Egypt. It has to do with the perception of poverty: People’s expectations come from their peers and the people who live around them. In Upper Egypt, poor people do not live very differently from the rich. Middle classes in metropolitan areas live much more extravagantly than the rich of Upper Egypt.

In the city, your maid, your driver and the people helping you see what you eat and do and want to have the same pattern of life, more or less of course. They consider themselves frustrated and under pressure. But are they poor? Objectively, they are not, but they have higher expectations. This is what causes problems.

We talk about who deserves government assistance. Apparently everybody does, judging by the queues to get the ration cards. They all believe they deserve the food subsidy. Is it true? I cannot tell you this. When you ask anyone, and when you ask me or you, we will all complain. Life is hard and prices are high and we are all under pressure. For some people, all these burdens affect savings and not consumption. Other segments reallocate. For yet others, they are really hurt and can fall under the poverty line.

We have to distinguish between living standards and poverty. There might be deterioration in the living standards of the lower middle classes, but they have not necessarily become poor. I cannot claim otherwise. I can see the frustration and I can see the disappointment, it is something you can see in all those around you. The question that needs to be answered is “Why?”

The government is aware of the mistrust, and is trying to determine the best way to deal with it and to improve its image. But when there is no public support, it postpones needed reforms that are crucial. All the coming economic reforms are not going to be easy.

Poverty is widespread in Egypt, affecting 40 percent of the population, and there are deep pockets of poverty. During 2000–2005, absolute poverty increased, but there was a reduction in the number of near-poor, leading to a decrease in the ‘all poor’ ration. —Arab Republic of Egypt Poverty Assessment Update, World Bank, 2007