National reading competition launched for Egypt’s students, teachers

CAIRO - 22 February 2020: In a way to make children and youth get down to reading, the competitions of the newly-launched National Reading Program (NRP) by the Ministry of Education opened for the students and teachers nationwide.

The program aims at making the students nationwide to keep reading to enhance their knowledge skills. The program comes within Egypt’s Agenda of 2030 Vision, in cooperation with the United Arab of Emirates.

At “High-Level Conference on Accelerating Learning in the Middle East and Africa” in Cairo last week, Minister of Education Tarek Shawki announced that annual competitions will be open mid-February.

He added that the Education Ministry mulls, in cooperation with the Finance Ministry, offering a new financial incentive to teachers and adopting a new method to assess their performance.

The NRP annual competition has four categories, the ministry announced, saying that LE 5 million were allocated for each one. The first one is titled ‘Knowledge-based Competitiveness.” which will be held among the students in primary, preparatory and secondary schools, besides the educational religious institutions of Al-Azhar.

The second category is “the Diamond Blog” for the academic students and the first winner all over the state’s universities will be granted LE1 million all over the state.

“The Intellectual Teacher” is the third category of the competition as the applicants where should be teachers and have to reach and sum up 30 Arabic-language books, including five books on the education and 25 others on the general culture and knowledge.

The fourth category titled “Enlightening Institution” as the social organizations have to offer their projects that participate in enhancing and boosting the program’s goals. The winner will be provided LE1 million.

The participants also can read in any field they want but the fields should not be less than five sciences. The names of the winners will be announced in June 2020 as the first winners of the four categories will be granted LE1 million each.

Al-Wafaa primary school in Hurghada, Red Sea, was the first school to announce its participation all over the state since the opening of the competition last week, according to Al-Dostor and al-Watan newspapers.

In addition to this, al-Azhar University announced its participation in the competition on the level of academic universities nationwide

In Upper Egypt, Governors of Luxor, Aswan, Qena and Red Sea and representatives from the Scientific Research Institution held a conference to launch the competition, presenting a preparatory session on how to apply for the competition, state-owned newspaper al-Ahram reported on December 29, 2019.

Egypt has encouraged reading through many initiatives, including Reading for All campaign formerly launched by Suzan Mubarak, wife of former President Hosni Mubarak. The campaign sought to encourage reading among children to decrease illiteracy. Egypt also hosts millions of visitors at the International Book Fair in Cairo, which is organized annually. The fair has been organized since 1969.

However, the ministry of education revealed in a report in November 2019 that the reading and writing skills among the students are at a low level, promising to eradicate the illiteracy among the people of the nation.