Minister Claims One in Five Cairenes are iIliterate

Egypt is faced with a lot of tough truths to swallow. Proving to be a jagged pill is the recent statement by Population Minister, Hala Youssef, who claims that the illiteracy rate in Cairo has reached 20%.

The statement was by the minister during a meeting for the National Council of Population on Monday. At the meeting the minister blamed the low level of education in the city. This shouldn’t shock many; however her point highlights the fact that education system in Egypt is broken. If the education in the capital of Egypt is extremely poor, what chances do those living in smaller cities and rural villages have acquiring basic reading and writing skills?

The Population Ministry is tasked with developing strategies to be implanted through all of Egypt’s governorates. With accurate stats being hard to obtain in a ballooning population, the minister believes the first step will be to do a preliminary analysis of Cairo’s population before attempting to tackle the complicated population crisis in Alexandria.

Hopefully the government will recognise how dire the situation has become and prioritise the restructuring of Egypt’s education system above other national problems, as it is entirely unacceptable to have one in five people incapable of reading and writing in the capital. If that’s Cairo, we hate to think about the total percentage of Egyptians that our illiterate across the entire country.