Egypt: Declining Funding Undermines Education, Health Care
The Egyptian government has severely undermined the rights to education and health care by failing to allocate sufficient spending, falling short of constitutional obligations and international benchmarks, Human Rights Watch said today. It is failing to ensure free primary education for every child and quality health care accessible to all.
Inadequate funding has contributed to severe shortages and high costs. Egypt has a shortage of hundreds of thousands of classrooms and teachers while the health care system suffers from low salaries, an inadequate doctor-to-population ratio, and a lack of 75,000 nurses. Families pay school fees and out-of-pocket costs, a majority of health care expenses are paid out of pocket, and doctors are personally paying for essential hospital supplies.
“The Egyptian government has failed for years to adequately ensure the rights of education and health for everyone, as demonstrated by its chronic underfunding,” said Amr Magdi, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The lack of adequate funding for health and education demonstrates the government’s deep indifference toward its citizens’ rights.”
Human Rights Watch analysis found that, over the past five years, education spending in Egypt has consistently decreased in inflation-adjusted terms and as a percentage of total government expenditure and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Health care spending has mostly decreased in inflation-adjusted terms but fluctuated as a percentage of total expenditure and GDP.
In fiscal year 2025-26, which began July 1, 2025, the government proposed and parliament approved an education budget of 315 billion Egyptian pounds (about US$6.3 billion), equivalent to 1.5 percent of Egypt’s GDP and about 4.7 percent of government expenditure. Human Rights Watch analysis found that this is the lowest percentage of the budget allocated for education since at least 2019. In inflation-adjusted terms, Human Rights Watch found that spending on education decreased 10 percent from 2024/25 and is 39 percent lower than in 2013/14 or 2014/15, when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power.
Egypt’s 2014 Constitution requires the government to spend no less than 6 percent of GDP on education. Prevailing international benchmarks recommend 4 to 6 percent of GDP and at least 15 to 20 percent of public expenditure. Human Rights Watch's calculation for 2025-26 spending as a percent of GDP would place Egypt in the 12th percentile of all lower middle-income countries, spending less than 88 percent of similarly situated countries.
The current year’s health budget of 245 billion pounds (about $4.9 billion) is equivalent to just 1.1 percent of Egypt’s GPD and 3.6 percent of total government expenditure. Human Rights Watch found that the budgets from 2021/22 to 2025/26 fluctuated between 1 and 1.4 percent of GDP, never reaching even half the minimum 3 percent the constitution requires.
After adjusting for inflation, health spending in 2025/26 is only 2 percent higher than the prior year and remains 4 percent lower than in 2022/23. When taking population growth into account, per person spending is flat over the last three years.
Egypt’s health spending is also significantly below international benchmarks. The Abuja Declaration of 2001, which Egypt signed, included a pledge to allocate 15 percent of government expenditure to health. The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimatedthat providing universal health coverage, an important element of the right to health, generally requires governments to spend at least 5 to 6 percent of their GDP on health care, four to five times Egypt’s current allocation. Egypt adopted a landmark Universal Health Insurance Lawin 2018, which aims to achieve full coverage by 2030.
As in prior years, the government falsely claimed that its 2025/26 budget met constitutional spending minimums for health and education by including extraneous budget lines, such as debt servicing, in its calculations. In 2022, Egypt spent more than twice as much servicing its external public debt per capita than it spent on health care.