Overpopulation in Egypt is a cause of unemployment because it increases the percentage of the labour force that is seeking jobs in the job market. According to the International Finance Corporation, the rapid population growth in Egypt has “endowed Egypt with a large and young population” (Egypt 1), and even though population growth has slowed down in Egypt in the recent years, the labour force continues to expand. Overpopulation is a great menace that threatens the Egyptian society by the great increase in the unemployed labour force. According to a research made by the International Finance Corporation, the Egyptian population in the year 1995 was equal to sixty million while the annual increase in the population is equal to two percent of the population and this rate increases due to the increase in population. This research estimated that the annual increase in the labour force per year is equal to 2.7, which is greater than the population increase (Egypt 2). This over increase in the rates of unemployment is due to privatization.
Privatization is considered another danger that threatens to increase unemployment in Egypt. It has been a controversial topic since the government started it in the nineties. The privatization program has been carried out by the government in order to enhance the structure of the public sector, as it was in its way to collapse, because the wages were highly decreasing. In the age of our grandparents, the public sector job was the aim of every graduating student from college as it provided a secure life because of its high salary. In contrast to this, they considered the private field risky because it had no constant income, and they were searching for stability. We may notice their respect for the public sector jobs, or the "miri" as they called it; they searched for jobs in the public sector by all possible means. This is shown in the proverb “if you cannot have a miri job, wallow in its dust” (Amin 66). Nowadays, the situation is completely different, as the majority of the people seek private jobs, by working in private firms or even running their own business. This variation is due to the economic changes in Egypt after the revolution and the open door policy that Sadat had introduced. The reform program that the government has established aims to improve the economic status of Egypt by selling the public sector companies to investors. Although the privatization program that the government has started aims to strengthen Egypt’s economy and standard of living of the working employee, it is blamed for the labour unrest problems in Egypt.
Mona El-Fiqi, the writer for Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper summarizes the problem in her quotation: “Privatization clearly had a positive impact on the Egyptian economy. But it also had a negative impact on society, contributing to increase rates of poverty and unemployment” (El Fiqi 1). She accuses the privatization program of being responsible for the highly increased rates of unemployment in Egypt, and this opinion is true because the privatization program must be slowed down to avoid laying off more workers that will contribute in the increase of the unemployment rates in Egypt. This fact is supported by the finding of the International Labour Organization assessed that Egypt was running at 8.5 percent of unemployment ten years ago, however it is currently running at 17 percent (qtd. in El Fiqi 2). The high increase in unemployment is surely related to privatization as the public sector was the main supplier of jobs in the past few years. Hamdi Abdel Azim, professor of economics and dean of the research centre at the Sadat Academy for Administrative Sciences points out that: “Due to privatization, nearly 20,000 workers have been ousted from their public sector jobs” (El Fiqi 1). Clearly, the fact that the privatization program had a very negative effect on the labour force cannot be denied.
Privatization now endangers many public sector employees' lives, as they fear to be laid off or dismissed from the company. A warning was sounded by Abdel-Fadil, a professor of economics at Cairo University, on what implications the survey had for solving Egypt’s unemployment problem. This survey showed that the government remains the main employer, providing 42 percent of job opportunities (Farag 2). In addition to these statements, Hamdi Abdel-Azim states that privatization has fuelled a rise in unemployment, because there are 450,000 workers looking for jobs each year, and the private sector is only providing 150,000 job opportunities. Thus, there are 300,000 new jobless people each year in addition to workers who have been laid off by the public sector companies (El-Fiqi 4). These statistics indicate the severity of the unemployment problem.
The ghost of unemployment is one of the major problems that Egypt is trying to find a solution to. Fatemah Farag, a journalist for Al-Ahram Weekly, said that the second meeting of the new cabinet on the seventh of November 1999, chaired by the Prime Minister Atef Ebeid, discussed ways of decreasing the rise in unemployment which has now reached 1.4 million (1). But, in addition to these high rates of labour unemployment, the government is not capable of supplying sufficient jobs for the graduating college students every year, so this number is increasing every year. These facts are proved by the report prepared by the Shura Council’s Human Resource Committee that predicted the labour force would reach twenty two million by the year 2002 (Farag 1). Those statistics show that the Egyptian job market is not capable of absorbing all the unemployed labour force. Nader El-Fergany, head of Almishkat Research Center, has concluded that little over 700,000 new job opportunities were created in the recent five years, but this number is needed to be created annually to absorb all new entrants (Farag 1). The World Bank estimates suggest that half a million new jobs will be needed annually for the next several years to take the new applicants in to the labour market and make “inroads into the present backlog of unemployment” (Egypt 1). These high numbers of jobs that is in need can't be feasible, thus other solutions must be taken to solve these problems.
Trying to solve the rapid increase of the population, the government has established a program to control the birth rates to decrease the increase in the overpopulation. The Prime minister of Egypt, Atef Ebeid, said Egypt has made a great progress in the birth control program as in a ten years period the birth increase rate will decrease from 2% to 1.5% and the average persons in the family will become 4.6 person in contrast to 6.1 person (Farag 2). Other estimation was done by the "Economic Commision for Africa", which is a department in the United Nations, this assessment showed that the birth rates in Egypt is decreasing from 24 thousand in the year 2000 to reach 21.6 thousand by the year 2010 (Crude Birth Rates of Northern African Countries, 1950-2050 2). This shows that the decrease in the population increase rate will be decreased by a rate 0f 0.5% that obviously will decrease the rate of the increase in the unemployment rates every year, as overpopulation and unemployment are directly related. In other words, the government was successful in launching the program of controlling birth especially in the countryside where the birth rates are very high. The success of this program will definitely affect the unemployment rates positively, as it is a way to diminish the increase of the population.
What is the solution to the unemployment problems? The solution to these problems can’t be only one program or a policy; it should be a mixture of programs that either prepares people to fill job vacancies or offers them temporarily work placements (Philpott 218). The government is doing its best to decrease the unemployment rate. Dr. Atef Ebeid says that the government attaches great importance to the issue of unemployment and the creation of job opportunities and has actually completed an overall plan that will provide 150,000 new public and private jobs (Egypt’s Plan of Action Centers on Unemployment, Development). The opinion of Dr. Atef Ebied is correct to some extent, but those proposed solution can't solve the problem completely, thus, slowing down the privatization program, would be a suitable solution at this stage. The main key for solving the problem is developing great projects as Toshka and the reclamation of the desert in Sinai. These projects will aid to solve the problem of unemployment as they may offer many job opportunities for unemployed workers. Naguib Mahfouz declared that “when the Toshka project is complete; it will pave the way for the creation of a new Egypt. It will solve many of the problems plaguing us: the shortage of arable land, the lack of housing and unemployment” (Mahfouz 1). We all hope that in the Future problems, such as unemployment, would be solved to live a more desirable life.
Works Cited
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<http://www.un.org/Depts/eca/divis/fssd/nafribir.htm>
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