Meritocracy tells us that hard work always pays off. Dedicate yourself to a career path, put in the required effort, and you’ll make it in today’s world. According to this ideology, those at the bottom, the poor, the “lesser-than,” simply haven’t worked hard enough. Somehow living comfortably has become a luxury, and those without said luxury... well, they are simply too “lazy” to seize the countless opportunities before them. What this blind and privileged ideology refuses to acknowledge is the fact that being rich is being exploitative, working within a system that is built on inequality and the presence of a lower class.
What it fails to take into account is that everything in our society seems to ensure that the lower class will remain the lower class-- that the poor will only get poorer. Our society has foundations in place that ensure that el zabbal will never become a CEO, and that ibn el bawwab will never be capable of earning a living wage. The point is, statistics show that -- “hard work” or not -- there is almost no possibility for positive social mobility. This solely negative social mobility is a plague that can be attributed to - you guessed it - the ineffective and murderous institutions that capitalism necessitates, but that’s a topic for another article.
Social mobility is a change in social status relative to one's current social location within a given society; as in, one’s ability to move up (or down) the social ladder. Egypt has been exhibiting a concerning trend of negative social mobility for years now, and its generational impact is becoming more evident.
The presence of negative social mobility means two things:
1) the poor aren’t getting richer/are getting poorer.
2) the middle class is slipping into poverty.
Let’s discuss the first part of this statement. The poor here have multiple things standing in the way of their ability to make a better living. Some of these barriers to a better life include a lack of accessible and affordable education, classist biases within employment forces, the prevalence of nepotism within Egyptian society, and a lack of affordable necessities (housing, clean water, food, transportation, etc.). These barriers are only becoming more and more prevalent as climate change takes its toll on poor rural communities and the government focuses on aiding its national debt instead of its own people. Not only are less poor people making it out of poverty, but more people are being shoved under the poverty line. As of 2019, 33% of the 99 million people living in Egypt live under the poverty line, a percentage that increased from 28% in 2015, despite the Egyptian government’s pledge to halve poverty rates in Egypt by 2020. This leads us to the second point; our shrinking middle class.
Education is seen as a manifestation of hard work, a measure through which one can see whether they will gain higher-status employment or not. Meritocracy tells us that if you study hard and get a good education, you’ll be able to get a good job and, again, you’ll make it in today’s world. Despite this promise, Egypt has been showcasing a trend of higher education per person, while social mobility is still going down. According to NEET Youth data, despite increasing educational attainment, young people in Egypt are underutilized: unemployment affects 1/6th of the economically active youth population (15.7%), and almost 1/3 (29 %) of youth in Egypt are neither in school nor in employment or training. This issue, like most, disproportionately affects women. While Egypt has made good progress in educating women (with schooling attainments getting closer to those of men), 23% of women actively searching for employment remain unemployed, compared to 8% of Egyptian men. These statistics show a contemporaneous decline in social mobility among all educated Egyptians, and a consistently unattainable labor force for Egyptian women and Egypt’s youth.
It is important to note that these circumstances mean that not only will people not see social mobility in their own lifetime, but generational poverty has it so that most families, generation to generation, will not see any improvement in their plight. And here's the kicker: not only will there be no improvement, but the generational situation will most likely worsen.
The reality of economic struggle in Egypt combined with increasing understanding and awareness of the causes behind this struggle has been incredibly disheartening for much of Egypt's youth. This lack of opportunity, largely created by increased corruption and nepotism within employment agencies, has reinforced Egyptians’ idealization of other countries with an outward image of more opportunities. Egyptians have been looking to emigration as a refuge and subsequently increasing the phenomena that is known as Brain Drain. Brain Drain is the departure of educated or professional people from a country for another, usually seeking better pay or living conditions. While this has been painted as some sort of betrayal to one’s country by angry nationalists, the only betrayal at play is the unwillingness of Egypt’s upper class to invest in its own people. If the Egyptian government truly wants this phenomenon to decrease, as it has claimed many times before, then it will need to put its resources and money where its mouth is and improve the unjust living situation that most Egyptians are suffering from.
That being said, let's talk about action items. While no wide-scale reform is eminent without governmental and systemic upheaval, there are a few lifesaving organizations that have taken up the cause of fighting generational poverty. Here's a list of some of the most impressive ones:
➔ Etijah: an NGO that provides resources for multiple initiatives that aid Egypt’s youth development.
➔ Resala: an NGO that coordinates countless volunteer activities that include sheltering homeless children, serving disabled Egyptians, providing accessible education, addiction treatment, and providing food and water to poor communities.
➔ The International Labor Organization: the ILO brings together governments, employers, and workers of 187 member states to set labor standards, develop policies, and devise programs promoting decent work for all women and men.
➔ Life Foundation for Development and Community Reintegration: A civil institution that consists of multiple programs, all of which aid in the rehabilitation and social integration of the most at-risk prisoners.
➔ EpiscoCare: an NGO that promotes comprehensive, sustainable development in some of Egypt's poorest communities.
➔ Human Rights Association for Community Development in Assiut: a nonprofit that promotes and protects human rights by advocating for the empowerment of citizens without discrimination and sustainable development programs under ethical foundations and values.
➔ CARE: an NGO that works closely through a rights-based approach with the poor and marginalized, civil society, and government institutions to improve livelihoods on a sustainable basis.
We have all been guilty of subscribing to the capitalist idea of meritocracy at one point or another; in fact, if Egyptian society weren’t inherently convinced of it, capitalism wouldn’t survive for a second. We need to recognize that socio-economic status is not and has never been a product of one’s work ethic; it is simply the product of a system that necessitates an oppressive upper class and a subjugated lower one. In a society where the “lower” class isn’t capable of living comfortably, where social status is the difference between life and death, prosperity and starvation, it is incredibly concerning that the lower class keeps growing.
All that is to say that change is necessary; change is survival for a lot of Egyptians nowadays. Whether you feed into that change through a monthly donation, consistent volunteering, or governmental advocacy, every action counts.
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