Egypt promotes birth control to slow population growth
The Egyptian government is launching a series of projects and campaigns to raise awareness about the country’s growing population and the negative impact it has on available resources.
Egypt’s growing population has reached over 101 million, an increase of more than 7 million since the last census in 2017, presenting a compelling problem for a country with limited resources.
For decades, the vast majority of Egypt’s population lived along the banks of the Nile River and the Nile Delta, a region that makes up around 7% of the country’s total area of around 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles).
According to the 2017 census of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), Egypt’s population was growing at a rate of approximately 2 million people per year.
Official data showed that Egypt’s population grew tenfold from 9.7 million to 100 million during the period 1897-2017. According to CAPMAS, while the first doubling of Egypt’s population took over 50 years, the population almost doubled again in 31 years, during the period 1986-2017, from 48.3 to 94.8 million, adding mounting pressure on various aspects of sustainable development in the country.
