Egypt: Growing call for higher education reforms

The large and comparatively diverse higher education sector is expected to see an encouraging increase in demand in the years to come, but a mismatch between the courses chosen by Egypt’s university students and the market’s requirements has highlighted the need for wide-ranging reforms across the university system.
About 55% of Egypt’s population, which numbers over 82m, is aged under 25. However, despite young Egyptians graduating in the hundreds of thousands every year, data from the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows the country had 600,000 unfilled job vacancies in 2012. This is not a situation unique to Egypt; Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are all facing similar problems as labour force growth outpaces employment growth. Nor does it look as though the supply-side pressure will change significantly any time soon, with the International Labour Organisation predicting an additional 10m youth will have entered the region’s workforce from 2010 to 2020. Read more...