During a Jan. 18 meeting to review the draft budget for the next fiscal year, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi instructed Finance Minister Mohamed Maait to include seven new measures in his plans. Among them were two related to the public education system, including the appointment of 30,000 new teachers annually for a period of five years, and a new incentive for teacher development worth 3.1 billion Egyptian pounds ($197 million) in total.

The aim of the mandate to significantly increase the number of teachers, according to the press statement, is to meet the development needs of Egypt’s public education sector, and the directive was praised by Education Minister Tarek Shawki as a “historic decision.” In a phone call to "Happens in Egypt" on MBC Egypt, Shawki expressed hope that the first group of 30,000 new teachers would be in place by the beginning of the next school year.

If implemented, the decision would represent an important step to halt the steady increase in a teacher-student ratio that Egypt’s public schools have experienced for years. And it could also pave the way to begin to reverse an acute shortage of professionals widely regarded as a primary reason for the current state of disrepair of its free education system.

“The decision proves that education is a state project [worth] providing all its efforts and capabilities to make it successful and to achieve Egypt’s worthy educational status,” Mahmoud Hassouna, spokesman of the Ministry of Education and Technical Education, told Al-Monitor. He noted that the five-year extension of the mandate “is a good step.”