President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi on Monday 28/02/2022 witnessed a ceremony launching the National Project for Development of the Egyptian Family.

The project is the cornerstone to address the overpopulation crisis out of a comprehensive vision including the health, social, family and economic dimensions. It will be implemented over three years (2021-2023) based on accurate databases and active communication mechanisms with all categories of the society, which can be used for interest of the project’s activities.

During its first year, the project is targeting governorates of the first phase of the presidential initiative “Decent Life”, which covers 1520 villages on the level of 52 centers in a number of 20 Upper and Lower Egyptian governorates.

Project Implementation Period:

The project will be implemented over three during the period from years from 2021 to 2023.

Targeted Categories:

The project is targeting females aged between 18 and 45 from school and university students, children in villages and rural areas, men of religion, preachers and nuns. The plan’s geographical scope covers all Egyptian governorates.

Project Axes:

The State developed a number of key axes for implementation of the project as follows:

1- Economic Axis:

The project aims at economically empowering females aged between 18 and 45 through financial independence and work via establishing units of “family health and development”, implementing one million female-led micro projects in different governorates, holding training for 2 million women on project management and establishing tailoring shops for women.

2- Service Intervention Axis:

It includes reducing women's unmet needs of reproductive health methods and making them available free of charge to all through training for 1500 female doctors to assume that mission at healthcare units nationwide, cooperating with 400 civil societies to provide the reproductive health services, preparing mobile service centers, providing the food baskets of first-1000-day program.

3- Digital Transformation Axis:

It aims to create a unified electronic system to automate and link all services provided to the Egyptian family, through building the “Egyptian Family System” to link the: marriage database, family database, Takaful and Karama database, database of family health and development units, with the database of the Egyptian Family Insurance Fund. This comes with the aim of measuring commitment to the terms of the proposed incentive program, in addition to building a system for monitoring and assessing the national project for development of the Egyptian family, as well as activating the role of the demographic observatory at Cairo Demographic Center to carry out the continuous monitoring of all demographic characteristics nationwide automatically.

4- Cultural, Awareness and Educational Axis:

It aims to raise citizens’ awareness of the basic concepts of the population issue as well as the social and economic effects of the population increase, through sending media messages at the State level and advertising campaigns in all available media outlets, raise awareness of (6 million) women of childbearing age and (2 million) young men and women who are about to get married, implement the “Mayor-Home Sessions” program that includes training religious leaders in different villages, raise awareness of the concept of family planning from the perspective of children’s rights, as well as cultural events and educational curricula to raise awareness of the economic and social dimensions of the population issue at the level of the Republic.

5- Legislative Axis:

It aims to develop a legislative and regulatory framework governing the policies adopted to control the population growth, through the Child Marriage Law, which includes criminalizing the marriage of minors and toughening the penalty including the parent, the Child Labor Law, which includes toughening the penalty and the guardian’s punishment, as well as the Birth Registration Law which includes criminalizing the non-registration of births.

China’s Xinhua said that Egypt's newly-launched project to rein in birthrates offers a "historic opportunity" to address the country's overpopulation issue.

"The launch of the National Project for Developing the Egyptian Family (NPDEF) is a historic opportunity to address the population increase, an issue that Egypt had started to tackle since 1965 via establishing the Supreme Council for Family Planning," Xinhua said.

The NPDEF is a comprehensive development project, not just focusing on boosting family planning and the health sector but covering five pillars, including the economic empowerment of women. It is also a project targeting the family as a whole and not just individuals, different from all previous initiatives that targeted women only.

Related links:

https://mped.gov.eg/AdminPanel/sharedfiles/%D8%AA%D9%86%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%A9_2022.pdf