“If we look at the average age in many countries, we find that in Europe it is about 45 years old. However, in Egypt the average age is 24 years old.”
Veteran Egyptian businessman Ahmed Al-Sweidi related this happy news to the Egyptian-French Business Forum in April this year. He added that this difference means that Egypt has great prospects embodied in “a strong young generation capable of driving development forwards”.
Al-Sweidi’s statement immediately conjures up different perspectives of the enormous economic opportunities implied by Egypt’s demographic map. Many of today’s debates revolve around the negative sides of population growth as perhaps increasing poverty. However, those who see Egypt as being on the threshold of a golden demographic dividend clearly sing to a different tune.
A cursory look at Egypt’s birth rates corroborates Al-Sweidi’s positive perspective. Egypt started its golden demographic phase with the decline in its annual population growth rates to 1.4 per cent in 2024, compared to 2.4 per cent in 2014. The number of children under 15 then dropped to about 33 million, or 31 per cent of the population. Meanwhile, the percentage of those economically active (aged between 15 and 64 years) rose to represent 63 per cent of all Egyptians.
As a result, Egypt may be about to benefit from a demographic dividend that has been hidden by high population growth rates for two decades. This time the wind seems to be blowing in Egypt’s favour, now that expenditure on children will likely decrease while the productivity of a growing skilled workforce will increase. This is what economists and foreign investors alike have long been yearning for.
“Egypt has the opportunity to become a regional and global economic power, if the energy of young people is directed towards strategic development projects,” Al-Sweidi told the forum. “Egypt’s young generation has the ability to adapt and develop in a rapidly changing world.”
Recent studies indicate a growing interest among young people to learn new skills and to catch up with a rapidly changing labour market. The growing demand for learning about Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be a case in point.
The government has also been launching many initiatives in this vein to fulfil the growing thirst for learning technology. The catch, however, is that many government institutions are still wired to an older bureaucratic mentality that would rather teach technology via rote techniques that depend on memorisation. The digital transformation programme provided by some state universities to those seeking a Masters or Doctoral degree is a case in point.
Too often, the programme does not go beyond IT basics. Students are still asked to sit traditional paper-based exams rather than being tested on computers in the absence of professional leadership.
DIVIDENDS: Nevertheless, the data clearly indicate that Egypt is on the threshold of a demographic dividend that will extend over the next five years, during which the country will become an ideal environment for skilled and trained labour by 2030.
Students at public and private universities in Egypt rose to about 650,000 in the academic year 2024-25, meaning that about 38 per cent of all those born in 2006 are now enrolled in university. This percentage is close to those enrolled in US universities and born in the same year.
The very fact that Egypt now bears comparison with the United States in the context of university education and manpower is largely attributed to a growing awareness of the importance of acquiring higher education and new skills to adapt to a highly competitive labour market.
In the meantime, this growing interest in higher education had been met with a parallel growth in the number of universities in Egypt. Egypt now boasts 116 universities compared to only 50 some 12 years ago. Meanwhile, the number of IT and AI students enrolled in Egyptian universities has seen a 40 per cent increase this year compared to last year.
The younger generation is sometimes stereotyped by older people as being less responsible and as too concerned with following trends. But on a recent visit to one of the new universities on the outskirts of Cairo, I was impressed by the number of female students flooding the corridors. This influx of female students, particularly in IT colleges, is an unmistakable sign of the societal changes that have seen women occupying 49 per cent of all student enrolment in 2024-25.
This is an unprecedented percentage and the first such figure since princess Fatima, the daughter of Egypt’s 19th-century ruler the khedive Ismail, sold some of her jewellery to help complete the construction of the Egyptian University (Cairo University) at the beginning of the last century. Had princess Fatima been alive today, she would have been impressed by the number of girls having access to a university education in Egypt.
These are all signs of a golden window of opportunity for the Egyptian economy, in which young people will be the main driving force behind increased productivity, resource saving, and ultimately higher incomes that, in the presence of good policies, would improve people’s well-being and their overall quality of living.
This demographic opportunity, however, requires public policies that promote investment in many sectors and improve the business environment in a way that will create new productive jobs that meet the aspirations of an increasingly active population.
The good news for Egypt is that the “demographic gift” should last about 20 years until the end of 2045. If this major opportunity is well-invested in, the Egyptian economy will witness great leaps forward. Conversely, Europe will be experiencing a shrinking population that will lead to a drop in its economic growth rates.
Egypt is thus on a date with a historic opportunity that could be like that of the 1860s, when the outbreak of the American Civil War led to a surge in Egypt’s cotton exports and paved the way for the construction of the cosmopolitan modern city of Cairo under the khedive Ismail, now nicknamed Khedival Cairo.
AGE PYRAMID: This demographic dividend is rooted in a significant change in the age pyramid in Egypt.
The percentage of children aged 0 to14 has dropped from 32 per cent in 2014 to 31 per cent in 2024. The present author predicts that the percentage will drop further and below 28 per cent by 2030. Meanwhile, the number of children aged under 18 has fallen from 39 to 37.7 per cent of the population during the same period. Again, the author speculates that there will be a further decline to 35 per cent by 2030.
These demographic shifts are mainly caused by the sharp decline in birth rates in Egypt from 2.7 million in 2014 to 1.9 million in 2024. That is, Egypt had 800,000 fewer children over a decade. The author predicts that birth rates will decrease even further to hit 1.6 million by 2030.
This shift in the age pyramid paints a promising picture of a “demographic gift” marked by a decline in the economic dependency rate to 61 per cent, compared to 69.8 per cent back in 1996. That is, over 100 productive people aged between 15 and 64 will be able to provide financial support to about 61 people who are not at a productive age either because they are too young or because they are too old.
This opportunity is probably a decade late, as it was expected to occur in the period between 2014 and 2024. Egypt’s fertility rates were expected to drop to 2.1 per cent by 2017, but a boom in birth rates unexpectedly occurred between 2011 and 2016, postponing Egypt’s “demographic revolution”.
This delay in Egypt’s demographic dividend has been costly in terms of education and healthcare, laying extra burdens on the state budget. Perhaps this explains the state’s rhetoric that population growth depletes development dividends.
During the past decade, Egypt has suffered from the repercussions of overpopulation, which has always been one of the country’s major challenges. The government has thus called for imposing family planning regulations to curb the consequences of an overblown population.
The sudden rise in birth rates to 2.7 million children in 2014, which stopped at 2.5 million children for the following four years, has put extra burdens on the education and healthcare sectors. The past five years, however, have seen a reverse in birth rates, probably due to social changes mainly marked by girls’ increased interest in education.
We can safely assume that Egypt’s demographic dividend was mainly gifted by our female population. Only six years ago, a friend of mine, who had obtained an intermediate education, was adamant that he would not allow his daughter to go to high school so that she could get married at an “appropriate age” of 18.
He further argued that she would be better off focusing on acquiring basic cooking and domestic skills than wasting time on formal education.
Today, that same father has largely changed his views, encouraging his daughter to finish high school and go to university on the grounds that marriage is “not everything” and that many married couples soon get divorced.
He now argues that his daughter should focus on her academics since marriage “would happen anyway” when it is the right time. “After all, what benefit would she gain if she gets married now without completing her education,” my friend asked.
He is not the only one who seems to be changing gears. Revisiting the current social discourse reveals a thinly layered shift in Egypt’s societal attitudes and in a mentality that remains largely unseen by some members of the elite, who still insist that we live in society dominated by old-fashioned patriarchal mentalities.
This elite may remain obsessed with their own 20-year-old thoughts, but they will soon be happy to discover that Egypt is seeing new demographic opportunities and a different social landscape, largely thanks to the female members of society.
Girls are already driving the country into a new era. We are on a date with a new renaissance similar to Egypt’s social revolution back in the early decades of the last century. At the end of the 1930s, Egypt had reached rates of labour force participation of 51.7 per cent of the total population. This percentage declined in the following decades to 44.9 per cent in 1966, 44.6 per cent in 1986, and 46.5 per cent in 1996.
On an optimistic note, the present author predicts that Egypt will have a 55 per cent labour force participation rate by 2030. That is approximately the same rate as in the 1940s, when Egypt was in its demographic heyday and had the most flourishing economy in modern times.
In short, the country’s age structure in 2030 will witness a surge in the number of people in the most productive and active age group, namely of people aged from 20 to 35 years old. That is, Egypt will have more than 27 million young people in that age group, representing about 24 per cent of the total population.
This goes in tandem with Egypt’s phenomenal increase in university enrollment. More than 3.8 million students are enrolled in Egyptian universities in the 2024-2025 academic year, and this number is expected to exceed four million by 2028.
Egypt now has an ideal demographic landscape with a huge number of better educated and skillful young people at its centre. About 40 per cent of these will be enrolled in universities by 2030. Dependency rates will then drop by half, while the labour market participation rate is expected to hit 55 per cent.
Egypt’s labour market will then be abundant with skilled personnel and even in need of importing unskilled labour from abroad, perhaps from Europe.
JOB OPPORTUNITIES: When my nephew travelled to Stuttgart, Germany, to attend a university engineering course recently, his family feared that he would have difficulty being on his own in a foreign country for the first time and wondered whether their son would be able to integrate into a foreign community.
Soon enough, however, all those fears disappeared when they found that their son had landed a temporary job in a German company only three weeks following his arrival. He was in his final year in college, and the German company even promised him a permanent job once he graduated.
The good news here is that my nephew is not the only lucky one. There is a growing need for skilled Egyptian labour in Europe. This may raise sceptical eyebrows, but a look at recent developments in Egypt’s university education, especially in private universities, and the growing demand for learning technology and engineering, is enough to explain that demand.
Egypt’s rapidly changing landscape, teamed up with a growing number of private universities, has been a magnet for foreign companies seeking educated and skilled labour that outdoes that from other places in the Middle East and Asia.
Moreover, this surge in the number of educated young people in Egypt has occurred in tandem with a growing gap in the labour market in many countries in Europe, as well as in Australia and Canada, which are now looking for skilled labour to fill the shortages in their markets.
Such huge vacancies in some foreign countries provide a great opportunity for Egyptian young people seeking a niche in the global labour market. Estimates already indicate a surge in the number of Egyptian young people employed in foreign countries. The number of employed expatriates has almost doubled, rising from about seven million in 2013 to almost 14 million in 2024, according to statements by Minister of Emigration and Expatriate Affairs Soha Gendi.
This growing demand for educated young people has reflected positively on the Egyptian economy. It has witnessed a decline in unemployment rates to about 6.4 per cent, as well as an 80.7 per cent rise in expatriate remittances between July and December 2024. According to the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), remittances amounted to about $17.1 billion during that period, compared to $9.4 billion in the same period of 2023.
The impact of the growing number of young Egyptian expatriates has become an issue of debate over the past few months, particularly in the medical field. According to the Ministry of Health, more than 60 per cent of Egyptian doctors are working abroad, for example.
The number of doctors quitting their jobs in Egypt for employment in the Gulf, Europe, and the US is increasing annually, says a BBC report. The report shows that Egyptian doctors constitute the third largest number of physicians employed in the UK’s National Health Service, to the tune of about 4,000 Egyptian staff members.
This is a vote of confidence in favour of the quality of medical education in Egypt. But there is another side to the coin. Critics say that the exodus of Egypt’s physicians could create a domestic shortage in the profession and that doctors should consider their obligations towards their homeland.
This perspective dates back to the Nasserist period, when citizens were seen as “soldiers in a battle” for development rather than as individuals with their own personal ambitions and goals. The state must adopt a more flexible perspective that weighs national and personal interests equally rather than imposing restrictions on traveling and working abroad, which curtails people’s personal ambitions.
Restricting the exodus of Egyptian physicians is less needed now that Egypt is experiencing an exceptional demographic dividend, with its population being increasingly young and productive. It would be prudent to consider enrolling larger numbers of students in medical schools and expanding the provision of private alternatives. Meanwhile, there is a growing need to refute misconceptions regarding private medical universities as “selling certificates” to unqualified students, which are largely unfounded.
The main goalkeepers, though, will be the country’s businessmen, who must now prepare themselves for upcoming golden opportunities thanks to educational and social developments that are due to give the country’s strained economy a new lease of life.
The writer is an expert on Egyptian demographics.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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