Egypt hits primary school enrollment targets, but reading literacy rates lag

On paper, Egypt has nearly achieved universal primary education, with completion rates hitting 96% in 2024, according to the Unesco’s recently released Global Education Monitoring report (pdf). This puts Egypt ahead of many of its regional peers on these two points, outpacing Morocco’s 84% and Iraq’s 83% completion rate.

The country also seems to have a comparatively decent out-of-school rate for the age cohort of just 4%, which again leads many of the other Arab nations — at points by a substantial margin. By comparison, out-of-school rates for primary education are 39% in Libya, 27% in Lebanon, and 8% in the much wealthier Gulf nation of Bahrain.

But the headline figures hide a concerning fact — only 34% of Egyptian primary students achieve a minimum reading proficiency level by the end of the primary period. In mathematics, that figure drops to 29%.

On this metric, Egypt falls behind some of the nations that it surpasses in enrollment numbers. Some 41% of Moroccan primary students reach a minimum level of reading proficiency. Likewise, 71% of children finishing primary education in Bahrain hit the mark.

Why this matters: Ask any teacher, and they will tell you that reaching reading proficiency before the end of primary schooling is one of the most important milestones for a child’s education trajectory. While primary education focuses on learning to read, education after this moves to reading to learn. Starting post-primary education without a solid reading skill foundation to build on has a snowballing effect that carries on all the way to the students becoming adults and joining the labor market, as students find it more difficult to catch up.

Quantity over quality

The out-of-school rate in primary education fell 9 percentage points between 2015 and 2024, alongside a 4 percentage point improvement in completion rates over the same period. This is no small feat given that the primary age population over these years grew 4.1 mn — or 34.8% — over this period to 15.9 mn, according to our calculations using Capmas data.

But getting a child to enroll in primary school is only the first step. While the construction of 150k classrooms for all school ages over the past decade has helped accommodate greater student numbers, attendance and not dropping out doesn’t necessarily mean that children will learn the necessary skills they need to. Adequate teacher numbers, supportive class densities, and a supporting academic framework are essential for proper learning.

The government acknowledges that class sizes are a problem and has committed to reducing class density for all age groups to 30 students per class by 2030, down from 40 students last fiscal year, in its second edition of the National Narrative for Comprehensive Development (pdf). This will be supported by bringing down the student-to-teacher ratio to 20:1 by the end of the decade, down from 29:1 last fiscal year, and by focusing on high-density governorates such as Giza, Assiut, Minya, Sohag, Fayoum, Qena, Cairo, Beni Suef, and Qalyubia.

Smaller classrooms mean more teachers, but recruiting them remains a challenge. Egypt lost 127k teachers between 2018 and 2023, which the Education Ministry plans to address by hiring 167k contract teachers and raising the per-lesson rate from 20 EGP to 50 EGP.

Overcrowded classrooms risk what those in education call learning poverty — where children are in school, but not learning. This not only fails to give the children the education that they deserve as a right in and of itself, but also harms the quality of entry-level labor that the country and the companies operating here need.

One key fix could be pre-primary education

Only 31.2% of pre-primary age children are enrolled in some sort of educational establishment, meaning that of the 4.7 mn children in this two-year age group, only 1.5 mn are receiving pre-primary schooling. This period is important for what educators call emergent literacy, where children build print and phonological awareness along with a knowledge of the alphabet, in addition to the groundwork for other important cognitive functions.

The state’s count of pre-primary enrolled children is even lower, with its 2030 roadmap saying that only 22.8% were in pre-primary education.

The state’s education roadmap for 2030 points to a 32% deficit in early childhood centers recorded in the fiscal year 2022-23. To bridge this gap, the plan proposes facilitating licensing for private nurseries and allowing private schools to host early-childhood classrooms, in addition to introducing new kindergarten curricula alongside staff training initiatives. By 2030, the government wants to increase the gross enrollment rate for children in pre-primary education to 35%.