Child marriage, overpopulation hindered sustainable development in Egypt: Study

CAIRO - 3 August 2022: The Egyptian Observatory, affiliated to the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies, published a new study on the characteristics of the population in Egypt, tracking back reasons that hindered sustainable development in the country over the years. 

 

The study stressed that the state had taken major steps in order to achieve sustainable development for citizens, exceeding the size of the projects that had been accomplished during previous decades, but they were not sufficiently influential either, and the reason is always that the state needs a lot to compensate for years of lack of development, in addition to the steady population increase is the real culprit of development. 

 

The research stated that, according to the latest estimates of the population, the population in Egypt reached 101,464 million people on January 1, 2021, and by reviewing the total population numbers in different censuses, the study found that the population according to the last census in 2017 was estimated at about 94.8 million, an increase of 22 million people over the previous census In 2006 (after only 11 years), with an average increase of 2 million annually.

 

While the country needed 22 years to increase the size of the population itself during the period (1960-1986), while the increase during the period (1882-1960) - which is 78 years- is estimated at about only 19.38 million people.

 

This is confirmed by the steadily increasing rates of population growth in recent times. The population growth rate did not exceed 1.5 percent until the 1940s, but the growth rate continued to increase until it reached 2.56 percent between the last two censuses.

 

These governorates are characterized by a number of cultural misconceptions that encouraged having many children. 

 

According to the Income, Expenditure and Consumption Research Report 2019/2020, the percentage of the poor increases with the increase in the size of the family. Seven percent of individuals who live in families with less than 4 members are poor, while the poverty percentage increases to 48 percent for individuals who live in families with 6-7 members, and the percentage reaches to 80 percent for individuals who live in families that has 10 or more people.

 

The study found that many of these families are forced to abandon their children's education and direct them to work to help increase the family's income.

 

According to the study, an individual's education is related to his standard of living, where poverty indicators decrease as the level of education rises, more than a third of the illiterate are poor, while 9.4 percent of those who hold university degrees are poor, while there is a small discrepancy between the rates of enrollment in basic education between males and females for non-poor children. 

 

The study also found that poor females are the least enrolled in education, especially in the age of 16-18 years.

 

This may be attributed to the increase in poverty rates and the tendency of some families to marry off their daughters (early marriage) to get rid of the burden of their expenses in general and their school expenses in particular.

 

According to the Women 2030 strategy, the percentage of females (20-29) who married before the age of 18 in 2014 was 18 percent, while a study by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in 2017 on early marriage in Egypt estimated that the number of those who married before the age of 10 -17 years old), amounting to 117,220 individuals, or 0.8 percent of the total population, in this age group, which is known as early marriage, of which a large proportion is underage marriage, and that Upper Egypt governorates have the highest rates of marriage and divorce.