On Sunday evening, as Ehab Hassan, a veterinarian who lives and practises in Kafr Al-Sheikh, was heading home after evening prayers, he was surrounded by a group of men who had also been at the prayers.
They were congratulating him on the announcement of the beginning of Dhu Al-Hijjah, the last month of the lunar calendar when Muslims mark Eid Al-Adha on the 10th of the month with the slaughter of sheep and other livestock.
“Everyone was congratulating everyone else, but in my capacity as a veterinarian who monitors the slaughter on the days of the Eid, there were also reminders to include certain families in the distribution of meat from the slaughtered livestock,” Hassan said.
According to Islamic rules, the meat of the sacrificed animal should be divided into three equal segments: one for the poor, one for the relatives, either in need or not, and one for the family that made the sacrifice.
According to Hassan, the process of division is usually conducted in the abattoir or the farm where the slaughtering happens, and the meat goes straight to those listed for the donations, especially the poor.
Traditionally, he said, the needy would gather before the abattoir to get their share, but with a growing number of civil servants in the lower income brackets joining those who accept donations today, the distribution has been redesigned to allow for a more concealed process.
Hassan said that in order to protect the identity of the new recipients, some packages are home-delivered.
However, for the poor, there is no unease about reaching out to get the donations, he said. “It is quite customary for the members of a poor family to distribute themselves at different slaughter areas to make sure that they get multiple packages that could last for quite a bit of time,” Hassan said.
Aziza Mohamed, a member of a cleanliness team on a state-run transport line in Cairo, agreed. She explained that apart from the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Eid Al-Adha is the only time of year when she can cook a meat-based dish for her husband, three children, and mother-in-law who lives with them.
She said that during the past few years, it was chicken rather than meat that was included in most food donations in Ramadan, one of the highest food-giving seasons in Egypt. This, she said, applied to individual donations as well as those coming out of NGOs.
Aziza Mohamed and her husband Saber Mohamed, who also works for a cleaning company, earns a little under LE10,000 a month.
“This is the money we need for rent, electricity, water, food, schools, clothes, medicine and everything else for the six of us,” she said. “With the rising prices of everything” from bread to vegetables, electricity bills, and gas cylinders, their monthly income has been falling short of allowing for meat purchases and has also made chicken and fish shopping infrequent.
“This has been the case for five years or so now,” she said, and it was partly for this reason that Eid Al-Adha is “a very special occasion”.
“We try to go to several places where we know meat is going to be distributed, and we try to collect enough for us to eat meat on a daily basis for a week or two, more if we can,” she added.
According to the last Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) report on incomes and spending in Egypt covering the 2021-2022 fiscal year, a little over 29 per cent of the population falls under the poverty line.
According to more recent CAPMAS figures, there has also been a consistent decline in meat consumption in Egypt that has taken the per capita meat intake to around 8 kg per person in 2023. Equally, CAPMAS has indicated a drop in the consumption of other forms of animal protein.
The average price of a kg of beef in Cairo this week almost hit the LE500 line while that of veal was close to LE600. The prices of lamb and mutton ranged from LE350 to LE450 per kg.
PRICED OUT: “These are not prices we can afford at all, and had it not been for the charity of good people meat would have been something from the past for us,” said Khalaf Abdel-Nasser, a porter at an apartment building in Cairo.
Prior to the spikes in prices, Abdel-Nasser said that the residents of the 20 apartments in the building he works in used to offer cooked or uncooked meat on a frequent basis. “There was not a month that would go by without some meat coming to us. Now this is not the case,” he said.
Consequently, on the first day of Eid Al-Adha 16 out of the 20 households send “a good package of meat” to those working in the building. “We cook a lot on the first three days when it is real feast, but after that we economise to keep the meat going for longer,” Abdel-Nasser said.
The residents of the other four apartments in the building are Copts. “They also send us meat, but they do it twice because for them meat is essential for the feasts of Christmas and Easter,” he said.
This year, Abdel-Nasser’s family had some meat in January, with Coptic Christmas, and some during Ramadan, in February-March, some last month, for Easter, and now the family is anxiously waiting for Eid Al-Adha.
“The trouble with all the feasts being adjacent to each other is that the second half of the year will come with no particular occasions for meat distribution,” Abdel-Nasser said. “Of course, it still happens but more rarely.”
Things differ significantly from one governorate to another and from one neighbourhood to another and for the well-off and the poor. For Ashour Saleh, a gardener who works in one of Cairo’s upper-middle-class neighbourhoods and in a couple of New Cairo compounds, things work differently, especially during Eid Al-Adha.
“Most people tend to travel to the Sahel [Alexandria’s western coast] for the holiday, and they are not into slaughtering directly. They just give out money,” he said. “I think it is better this way, because with the money I get, I can buy some meat for the week of the Eid and keep some to buy some more later,” he added.
Since he has a decent Eid money income, Saleh does not ask his wife or four children “to join the crowds who queue up before distribution points for meat during the Eid.”
“There are specific spots on the highways and on some specific streets and near some mosques where there is a systematic distribution of meat during the Eid. But I say to myself we have had our share, and we should not be fighting over extras because I know many people whose main intake of meat comes during this season,” he said.
Hafez Abdel-Fattah, a street cleaner, also subscribes to this group. He said that a few years back, he would go to 6 October Bridge in Cairo and wait for passing cars that give away packages of meat, both during Ramadan and Eid Al-Adha.
With this practice declining sharply, Abdel-Fattah decided to register for donations with some of the bigger charities in Cairo, where he sends his wife in the afternoon to get the meat while he still roams around the city in the hope of getting an extra package or a bit of extra money.
“Of course, there is much less of both now. I don’t think people have the means anymore,” he said.
According to Ibrahim Mahmoud and Shaimaa Abdallah who manage food assistance at two major charities, the decisions of more and more well-off people to pay money and ask for the whole of the slaughtered livestock to be distributed has made up for the decline in the number of those who used to register to sacrifice livestock for Eid Al-Adha.
“Some people have stopped coming, but at the same time, more people are offering their whole sacrifice for donation without taking their personal family share. This has been very helpful because we are also seeing more demand,” Abdallah said.
Having worked on the food donations for five years, Abdallah said that “during the last days of Ramadan, recipients start looking really unhappy, but when the Eid comes, they look really happy again. Unfortunately, it is only for a few days, though, and then we are back to normal with our food distributions that do not often include meat.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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