Market Intelligence Brief for Egypt now available

Egypt is a Middle Eastern heavyweight with a population of over 100 million people, 61 per cent of whom are under the age of 30. The country’s economy has recovered from the 2011 unrest with 5.6 per cent annual GDP growth in 2019. The economy is primarily driven by services and industry. The government is looking to boost macroeconomic performance and ensure sustainable, inclusive future growth that will reduce the youth unemployment rate – which was over 30 per cent in 2019.  

Because of the booming youth population and poor quality assurance, the Egyptian education system is struggling. The average class size in pre-tertiary is high, and educational infrastructure is crumbling as it tries to keep up with the increasing demand. The Egyptian government has made education one of the 10 key pillars of its development strategy and seeks to create a high-quality education system within an efficient, sustainable and flexible institutional framework and is working with the World Bank on a major reform project. In 2019, there were 3.1 million students enrolled in higher education in Egypt, a 50 per cent increase from 2010.

Lacking capacity at the tertiary level has pushed an increasing number of Egyptian students to look internationally for higher education – more than 35,000 Egyptian students went abroad in 2017, a 216 per cent increase in the space of a decade. The UK has benefitted from this trend. The number of Egyptian student in the UK has nearly doubled in a decade, reaching 3,020 students in 2018/19, 58 per cent of whom are undergraduates. UK TNE is very popular in Egypt, and the Egyptian government is welcoming more foreign cooperation to develop private higher education institutions, particularly in the New Administrative Capital.

In this Market Intelligence Brief, explore Egypt’s demographics, economics and education system. With an enormous and ambitious youth population, this Middle Eastern country will continue to be an important recruitment market for UK universities for years to come.

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The Market Intelligence Brief is designed to provide you with an overview of a particular country. Using the latest data from the most reliable sources, it represents a window onto the country's education system and student population as well as the economic, demographic and social factors that shape its higher education sector. The new 2020 series covers not only updated analysis on macro-economic and socio-economic indicators, but also provides a full picture of the education market of a given country.

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