Runaway population growth becoming nightmare

TO the dismay of the government, Egypt’s population will be only 10 million short of 200 million by 2050. The wake-up call was sounded during a televised interview given by Dr Amira Tawadros, Director of the Planning Ministry’s Demography Centre. She said that unless the current population increase was slowed, Egypt will choke with 190 million people.
Since 2011, the population rise has reached about 20 million. As a result, prices soared to meet demand. Egypt’s population still grows each year by approximately 1.5 million. This increase will occur because fertility rates are still high in many parts of Egypt.
Aware of the size of this challenge and its negative impact on socio-economic projects underway across the country, President Abdel Fatah El Sisi stressed the need to promote family planning in Egypt. During his inauguration of Silos Foods, a city for food industries in Sadat City, Menoufia Governorate, President El Sisi warned that rising population posed a major challenge, resulting in many problems, including urban encroachment on agricultural land. The president also stressed to the nation that population growth is a major challenge to all the state’s efforts in all fields.
To help preserve agricultural land and encourage young couples to start a new family life elsewhere, the government has built hundreds of thousands of low-cost housing units in different parts of the country.
The government has real concerns that soaring population growth could hamper its socio-economic development programmes. High fertility can impose costly burdens on Egypt; it can hinder economic development, increase health risks for women and children, and erode the quality of life by reducing access to education, nutrition, employment, and scarce resources, such as potable water.
The projected increase in population should draw the attention to the continuing need for government support of family planning programmes that can continue to provide high-quality services and reach more potential users.
Paradoxically, fertility rates are especially high in the poor rural areas of Upper Egypt, which is in desperate need for development. President El Sisi has launched the unprecedented LE700 billion initiative ‘Decent Life’ in poorest villages in Upper Egypt and the Delta. A third of Egypt’s population and nearly half of the Egyptian poor reside in the southern half of the country.
The President also launched an initiative need to provide healthcare for school students and to ensure that families are monitoring the state of health of our children through promoting healthy food access for children and engaging them in appropriate sports activities. Nonetheless, without positive co-operation from Egyptian families, the population growth will remain the government’s nightmare.