(Beirut) – Egyptian authorities have severely undermined the right to education in recent years by failing to allocate sufficient budgetary resources, Human Rights Watch said today.
The government has reduced the national budget for education in real terms and as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and expenditure, further exacerbating a crisis of poor-quality education, a shortage of adequately trained and remunerated teachers, and inadequate and insufficient public school infrastructure. The government has also failed to fully guarantee free primary and secondary education for every child, including refugee and asylum-seeking children.
“Insufficient spending on public education means the Egyptian government is delinquent on its obligations, with many students receiving poor-quality education in overcrowded and underfunded schools,” said Bassam Khawaja, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Yet, harsh repression that stymies free speech and precludes free and fair elections prevents the Egyptian people from contesting government spending priorities.”
In fiscal year 2024/25, the government proposed, and parliament approved, an education budget of 295 billion Egyptian pounds (about US$6 billion), equivalent to 1.7 percent of Egypt’s GDP of 17 trillion pounds (about $380 billion). It represents 5.3 percent of total government expenditure of 5.5 trillion pounds (about $110 billion).
Egypt’s education spending is well below constitutional mandates and international benchmarks. Egypt’s 2014 constitution committed the state to spending no less than 6 percent of GDP on education, including 4 percent on pre-university education. It set a target of fiscal year 2016/17 to achieve this while mandating that spending should gradually increase until reaching “global rates.” Prevailing international benchmarks recommend allocating 4 to 6 percent of GDP and at least 15 to 20 percent of public expenditure for education. Egypt’s education allocation is also less than half that of other lower middle-income countries, who allocate some 3.4 percent of GDP (2022) or 13.1 percent of public expenditure (2023), according to World Bank data.
While Egypt’s spending on education has nominally increased, it is falling over time in real terms and as a percentage of GDP and expenditure. Human Rights Watch analysis of the state budget over the past five years found that education spending declined from 2.3 percent of GDP in 2020/2021 (6.7 percent of government expenditure) to 1.7 percent of GDP (5.3 percent of government expenditure) in the 2024/25 budget, the lowest in five years. It has declined significantly from 3.9 percent of GDP in 2014/15, the first year of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s rule.
Human Rights Watch analysis also found that Egypt’s spending on education has decreased 24 percent since 2014 in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a leading independent group that has monitored Egypt’s education budget for many years, found that spending in 2023/24 reflected some of Egypt’s lowest education allocations historically.
Egypt’s education outcomes raise significant concerns, underscoring the need for robust funding for accessible, inclusive, and quality education. Egypt has a high illiteracy rate, with more than 1 in 4 adults (2021) as well as about 16 percent of those above age 10 (2023) unable to read or write. In certain age groups, women and girls are unable to read and write at roughly double the rate of boys and men .
The World Bank estimates that as of 2019, almost 70 percent of students in Egypt were in “learning poverty,” not able to read and understand an age-appropriate text by age 10. This was 14.5 percentage points worse than the average for lower middle-income countries that year. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in 2024 that the “quality of primary education is a critical challenge,” citing a 2021 international study assessing reading skills of grade 4 students in which Egypt ranked 42 out of 43 countries, and that “the majority” of students had “not achieved a basic level of reading skills.”
Egypt has a severe school shortage and a chronic crisis of overcrowded classrooms. The Education and Technical Education Ministry said in 2024 that there was a shortage of some 250,000 classrooms. Public school classroom sizes range on average from 43 to 55 students, but some schools have 200 students in one classroom. Local media have reported that students do not have chairs or desks in some schools. The ministry announced it intends to cap classroom size at 50 students in 90 percent of schools in the 2024/25 school year by moving some students to different schools and providing evening school shifts.
There is also an extreme shortage of teachers, which soared to 469,000 in 2024, according to official statements. The ministry opened a competition in 2022 to hire 30,000 assistant teachers on temporary contracts. According to the EIPR, teachers on temporary contracts are more vulnerable to labor abuses and receive monthly salaries of around 1,920 pounds (about $39), well below the minimum wage of 6,000 pounds (about $120).
Applicants were subjected to military-run physical fitness exams and interviewed by military officers on Defense Ministry premises. The military disqualified thousands of applicants on unlawful and discriminatory pretexts, including for being “overweight,” pregnant, or failing physical fitness exams. The authorities arrested and prosecuted some of the prospective teachers who peacefully protested being disqualified.
Egyptian officials have responded to criticism by blaming overpopulation, denying that the budget violates the constitution, and inflating budgets to include money allocated for servicing public debt. However, in June 2023, President Sisi acknowledged in public statements that his government had failed to meet constitutional targets for education, attributing it to a lack of resources and dismissing criticism.
President Sisi has downplayed the need to bolster the education budget in light of what he expressed as priorities such as security and military needs. However, Egypt has a low tax to GDP ratio of 14.1 percent (2022), below the 15 percent minimum threshold the World Bank considers necessary for a viable state and economic stability. The Tax Justice Network estimated that Egypt loses at least $438 million every year to tax abuse, and the EIPR has documented that the government’s tax policy fails to generate adequate revenue, particularly with regard to high-income individuals and corporations.
Human Rights Watch wrote to Egypt’s Ministry of Education and Technical Education on November 20, 2024, but received no response.
The government has failed to meet its obligation under the constitution, the 1981 education law, and international human rights law to provide free education. Public schools charge fees of some 210-520 Egyptian pounds (about US$5-10) per year, waived for some low-income students. As of 2019, even before recent waves of inflation and cost of living crises, families with children in school spent an average of 10.4 percent of their income on school-related costs. Due to poor-quality education, many parents are also paying for private lessons and tutoring.
The right to education is enshrined in international law, including in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which Egypt has ratified. Egypt should guarantee free and compulsory primary education to all children and is obliged to take deliberate, concrete, and targeted steps to the maximum of its available resources to fulfil the right to universal free secondary education.
Deliberate retrogressive measures, such as Egypt’s reduction in education spending, require “the most careful consideration and would need to be fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the Covenant and in the context of the full use of the maximum available resources.”
“President Sisi has frequently invoked social and economic rights as his government’s focus to deflect criticism of widespread, relentless political repression,” Khawaja said. “But the government’s policy for the past decade has shown a drastic failure to adequately fund quality public education, to the great detriment of millions of children and families across Egypt.”