Egypt

We help children on the streets to find a route to a better life; we raise standards of employment for children who harvest beans and asparagus sold in British supermarkets; we work to stop physical violence in schools.

Above all, we enforce children’s right to protection. 

The revolution gives Egypt’s children a chance of change. Working with the government, our Egyptian partner organisations, and children and their families, we aim to demonstrate just what can be done.

A protester holds up a child in front of a picture of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak during a protest in Cairo in January 2011.

• A quarter of Egypt’s 82 million people live in poverty.
• 2.7 million children work — often in hazardous conditions.
• Children as young as 15 are taking the dangerous road to Europe for work — risking life, arrest, abuse, and deportation.
• Since 1982, we have worked with some of the most vulnerable: street children, children without appropriate care, and children dropping out of education.
• In 2010 we reached 18,000 children directly and nearly 300,000 indirectly.

The challenges

Poverty is the single biggest factor limiting children’s lives.

In huge parts of Cairo, including the largest slum, where we work, up to 90% of people live below the poverty line.

Economic pressures are so great that children as young as eight are on the streets and teenagers are forced to take the dangerous journey to Europe in search of illegal jobs, risking arrest and deportation. 

“I hope that one day I can get an ID… a place to live and a family,” says Karim, one of up to 2 million street children in Cairo and Alexandria who joined the 2011 demonstrations.

When set against the lofty ideals of the Egyptian uprising, wrote Save the Children staff member who met him, his dreams don’t seem too much to ask.

What we’ve achieved

We’ve successfully pushed for a new child law and child protection committees, now both in legislation. Every governorate and district in Egypt now has a statutory obligation to set up a child protection committee.

In 2010, 800 children at risk were identified by social workers we’d trained, while another 1,000 children learned about their rights.

Our innovative toolkit on child labour on farms sets new standards to stop hazardous conditions for children — many harvesting or packing beans or asparagus for our supermarkets. 

Children’s centres run by our partners provide street children with education and vocational skills.

With funding from the Ford Foundation, we work with government ministries, child protection committees, local NGOs, children, and communities to support street children’s access to much-needed outreach services in some of Cairo’s poorest slums.

What’s urgent

We’ll be directly helping 32,600 more children directly in 2011.

Our female community health workers provide support to families with newborns and under-fives in Ezbet el Haggana slum in Cairo, a project started with support from Dana Petroleum.

But there are 174 officially recognised slums in Cairo and the need for affordable, quality healthcare is overwhelming.

As the only international NGO in Egypt working with child migrants, we’re investigating the causes of child migration and its implications.

With an EU grant of more than €1m, we’ll determine whether it’s more cost-effective, as well as more humane, for EU governments to spend their money preventing migration rather than erecting barriers.

What you can do

• Help provide young people with an alternative to migration, and support our research and advocacy to change the EU’s policy.
• Help us expand our child protection programme to stop the abuse and exploitation of children on the streets, in schools, in work, and in rural areas.

Find out more

• How Cairo's street children dream of a better future
• Getting it right for children who work: corporate responsibility and child labour in the agricultural sector in Egypt
• Our toolkit to address child labour in the agricultural sector in Egypt