The population of Egypt is heading to cross the 100 million threshold in February, as the digital population watch is expected to announce on the front of the headquarters of the Central Agency for Mobilization and Statistics in central Cairo the child who will bear the number 100 million.
The representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Egypt Alexander Poderosa said that the expected newborn will join the people of every six out of ten people under the age of 29 years.
Many Arab and African countries are struggling with population increases. But Poderosa said that the pressures in Egypt are severe because 97 percent of its people live on an area of only eight percent of its territory, which is crowded with the Nile Valley and Delta.
He added that creating new spaces for housing, schools and hospitals is a priority in light of Egypt's population growing by 2.5 million people each year. In populated areas, there are 1,400 people per square kilometer.
* Growth to create jobs:
And jobs is the biggest problem. The World Bank says that the workforce will reach eighty million within ten years.
But Radwa El-Sweify, head of research at Pharos Financial Investments in Cairo, said that to create a sufficient number of jobs, annual economic growth must be at least three times the rate of population growth.
Based on a population growth rate of 2.5 percent, this will require a 7.5 percent growth in gross domestic product, compared to the government's forecast of 5.9 percent for the current fiscal year.
In addition, Egypt's economy may be affected by water shortages due to climate change and a dam on a major tributary of the Nile, which is being built at the source in Ethiopia. Infrastructure, including public roads and transportation, will also be under pressure as a result of population growth.
"All this region thirty years ago was agricultural land," said Nabil Rawash, who is sixty years old and lives in the land of the brigade in Giza.
"But with crowding and population growth, people started coming here and building," he added as he stood on a street packed with people and cars.
New cities
Officials say they have been able to reduce fertility rates thanks to the "2 sufficiency" campaign to overcome the traditions of families in rural areas of childbearing.
The campaign targeted more than 1.1 million poor families with at most three children. The Ministry of Social Solidarity trains volunteers who work to encourage people to reduce childbearing rates.
"During 2019, we conducted two million and 680,000 home visits ... During these visits, 407,000 women requested that they be referred to family planning clinics," said Desire Labib, director of the Ministry's "2 Kafaya" project.
She pointed to a United Nations study that concluded that fertility fell to 3.1 in 2018 from 3.5 in 2014.
"If we apply more discipline so that families have fewer children, we can reach fertility rates at 2.1 by 2032," said Abdul Hamid Sharaf Al-Din, a senior official at the Statistics Authority.
He added that this still means that the population will increase to 153 million by 2052, but if the fertility rate is 3.4, the number will reach 191 million.
Either way, the government needs to do something about overpopulation in Cairo, where about one in five Egyptians lives. The government plans to start moving the ministries by June to a new administrative capital in the desert outside Cairo.