The Deadly Harvest: Egypt’s Child Farm Workers at the Mercy of Labour Brokers and Legal Gaps

Video: Ahmed El Sheikh
Cover design: Zawia3
Original infographics: Nahla Mohamed

At 13, Nourhan Mohamed, a pseudonym, has already spent four years working on farms. Born in Dakahlia governorate in Egypt’s Nile Delta, she was beaten severely by her father when she refused to join her mother in agricultural work. Despite her slight build and reluctance, she obeyed, hoping to pay for her education and help her mother raise her four sisters.

Nourhan began working at nine. Now in her first year of preparatory school, she says: “Work affected my studies. I would miss school several days a week to go to work, and my grades fell. That made me reduce work to two days a week last year.” She dreams of becoming an artist.

Like Nourhan, girls from poor families in Egyptian villages are pushed into farm work at an early age for meagre wages and long, exhausting hours unsuited to their bodies. This investigation documents the experiences of ten girls who worked below the legal employment age to support their families, amid inadequate oversight by the Ministry of Labour, formerly the Ministry of Manpower, and the social insurance authorities.

Some girls cannot finish school or obtain an intermediate qualification. Leaving home before dawn and travelling for hours to reach the fields makes school attendance impossible on working days.

The dangers extend beyond strenuous work. Girls are transported to fields in unsafe, degrading conditions that expose them to road crashes and serious injuries. The reporter documented 82 transport incidents involving agricultural workers between April 2017 and January 2025.

Labour brokers exploit families’ need for income to recruit girls, taking a share of wages that are already extremely low. The investigation examines gaps and exclusions in Egypt’s labour legislation and the protection of children.

Forced to work through injuries

Girls also describe mistreatment by employers, including indifference to injuries. Nourhan says a landowner once required her to continue working despite being hurt.

She travelled to farms in Giza, Beheira, Sharqia and Damietta while still very young. During her first year alongside her mother, she received no wage because employers regarded her as merely helping. She was first paid at ten. At the time of this investigation, her daily wage was EGP 50, approximately $0.99.

While harvesting on a farm in Giza, she slipped on wet ground and broke her foot. Her family paid for two months of treatment after the landowner refused responsibility, telling them: “It has nothing to do with me.” In December 2024, she cut her hand while gathering crops in Dakahlia. Her employer tied a piece of cloth around the bleeding hand and said: “Come on, carry on working.” She did.

Shereen Reda, 15, a third-year preparatory-school student, began farm work at ten. Her working day, including travel, lasted 12 hours for no more than EGP 150, approximately $2.98. An eye injury while picking cotton left her with impaired vision and visual disturbances at work. Her family paid for treatment because the employer refused to cover it.

Wages consumed by brokers’ deductions

A labour contractor, locally known as a moqawel anfar, connects girls’ parents with farm owners. In return, the contractor takes part of their daily pay for finding work, sometimes taking a further amount for transport when the landowner will not cover it.

Nourhan and her colleagues say the broker deducts EGP 10, approximately $0.20, per worker for securing the job. That leaves her EGP 40, about $0.80, for seven to eight hours picking cotton, onions, garlic, tomatoes or aubergines. She considers neither the income nor the conditions adequate.

“If my financial circumstances were better, I would not do this work.” — Nourhan, 13

Sama, 16, describes a similar arrangement. Her contractor deducts EGP 10 per person for transport, leaving her EGP 90, approximately $1.79. “The contractor does not deserve that amount,” she says. After a gruelling day she returns home too exhausted to move, work or study.

“I dream of becoming an engineer one day and fulfilling my mother’s wish that I finish my education, so she will not have to work for us again,” Sama says.

“Their families ask us to employ them”

Mahfouza El Sayed, 45, from Damietta, worked as a labour broker for seven years before leaving the job in 2022. With her finances worsening, she now works as a farm labourer herself.

“When I was a contractor, the landowner paid me one pound per worker per day, while each worker received EGP 50,” she says. She operated in villages around Damietta. Arranging and paying for transport was the landowner’s responsibility, with workers carried on small pickup trucks or agricultural tractors.

Sometimes no vehicle was provided. “The employer would tell us to walk if the distance was not very long,” she says.

Mahfouza avoided answering directly about transport safety, but recalled a neighbour who was run over by the tractor carrying workers after it overturned in 2023.

Parents frequently asked Mahfouza to find farm work for their children because of financial hardship. The children were generally aged 12 to 15. “I chose orphans among them because I considered them the most in need of work,” she says.

She recalls the last girl she recruited before leaving the brokerage job: a 15-year-old who had dropped out of school and whose mother asked for a place in the fields. The girl earned EGP 20–25 a day. The original report gives equivalents of $0.65–0.81 using the official EGP 30.85 exchange rate recorded on December 22, 2023. These conversions illustrate the earlier wage level using that stated rate.

Employers provided no meals, Mahfouza says. Children carried the same burdens and worked the same hours as adults, without adjustments for their age.

Faiza Abbas, a pseudonym, is a 50-year-old labour broker in Belqas, Dakahlia. Over the years, parents have repeatedly asked her to find work for children aged 12 to 15. She estimates that boys account for 60% of these requests and girls 40%.

The last child she recruited, two years before the interview, was her own granddaughter, then no older than 12. Her daughter, whose husband had died, asked her to find work to help pay school expenses. The granddaughter still combines school and farm work, earning EGP 60–70 a day, approximately $1.19–1.39, for eight to eleven hours. Faiza acknowledges that the work is harsh for children.

Death on the journey to work

Several girls interviewed describe the vehicles taking them to and from farms as dangerous. Crashes can leave them seriously injured or dead.

Workers, including children, travel on tractors, small pickups and medium trucks, usually arranged by contractors. The reporter documented these conditions through interviews with workers, relatives and brokers.

An investigation database compiled from news archives records 82 transport incidents between April 28, 2017, and January 2, 2025. Small pickup trucks accounted for 51, medium trucks for 18 and minibuses for six.

The 82 transport incidents left 988 people injured and 125 dead. A broader count, encompassing transport and incidents connected with the work itself, recorded 107 cases. Road collisions were the largest category, with 74 cases, followed by poisoning, with eight, and crushing or run-over incidents, with four. Beheira accounted for 63 recorded incidents, while Dakahlia and Ismailia each had nine.

Nourhan remembers a crash while travelling to work with her mother. A medium truck carrying the workers overturned, throwing her mother onto her back and causing Nourhan’s head to strike the vehicle’s metalwork. She needed treatment for a week. The employer paid none of their medical costs.

Six months before that crash, Nourhan’s foot had become caught in metal at the rear of a vehicle. The injury nearly cost her a leg, she says. Again, the employer refused to pay for treatment.

Shereen Mahmoud, 38, broke her arm after falling from a vehicle on the way to work. Treatment lasted a month and a half. A year later, the truck carrying her and her colleagues overturned after hitting a bump, causing some passengers to fall onto their heads. The landowner did not cover treatment costs.

Work at the expense of education

Yasmin Mostafa, a pseudonym, 16, began farm work at 12. “I had to miss school several times to work in the fields with my mother,” she says. During preparatory school she would tell teachers she was ill. Her grades fell, and she entered a commercial secondary school leading to an intermediate qualification.

Yasmin initially left agriculture, but financial pressure forced her back into paid work. She became a cleaner at a school so she could continue attending her own classes.

Mai Reda, 20, lost the chance to enter general secondary school and with it her childhood dream of becoming a doctor. She began farm work with her mother at 14 and missed school while trying to pay educational expenses.

“Our financial circumstances did not allow me to study medicine or enter general secondary school, even though my grades qualified me,” she says.

Calls for safe transport and health coverage

Dakahlia farmers’ syndicate head Naguib Mohamady says a daily farm wage of EGP 100, approximately $1.99, is not enough to live on. He calls for social insurance, pension provision and the application of protections for agricultural workers.

Mohamady estimates that Egypt has 20–25 million agricultural workers, with women accounting for half and children 12%. These are his estimates and cover a much broader population than the official employment count cited below. Half of his estimated range would be 10–12.5 million women.

He calls for comprehensive health insurance, safer roads and transport, describing most vehicles used as open and degrading. Authorities should organise farm employment, increase wages to allow a decent life and reinstate an agricultural-worker pension that was stopped years earlier, he says.

Legal gaps and international obligations

The legal discussion concerns the framework in place when this investigation was originally published in March 2025. Article 26 of Labour Law No. 12 of 2003 assigns the relevant ministry responsibility for policy and oversight of irregular employment, including seasonal farm workers, seafarers, miners, quarry workers and construction workers. It provides for ministerial rules covering employment, occupational safety, transport, accommodation and associated financial and administrative arrangements.

Article 97 excludes women engaged in “purely agricultural work” from that law’s chapter on women’s employment. Article 103 excludes children in purely agricultural work from its chapter on child employment. These are exclusions from particular chapters, rather than a blanket statement that all agricultural work falls outside every provision of the law.

CAPMAS data for 2022 placed agriculture and fishing first among economic activities by employment, at 18.9%, or 5.273 million workers. Average weekly hours were 43, approximately seven hours a day over six days. The reported average agricultural daily wage was EGP 105.60, approximately $4.27 at the EGP 24.71 official exchange rate recorded at the National Bank of Egypt on December 31, 2022.

Child-rights expert Hani Helal argues that exclusions in labour and child-protection legislation leave farm workers inadequately protected. In his assessment, the treatment of purely agricultural labour, domestic work and work within a family creates constitutional and legal shortcomings.

Helal says children recruited for seasonal agricultural work through contractors lack adequate legislative coverage. A father who beats a child and forces her to work can face child-endangerment charges, which he says may carry a six-month prison sentence. A broker who takes money for recruitment or transport can face economic-exploitation charges, but, in Helal’s account, is not prosecuted simply for employing an underage agricultural worker.

His criticism should be read alongside the Child Law’s protections: its general minimum employment age is 15, with a narrowly authorised exception for seasonal work by children aged 12–14 that must not harm health or development or interfere with school attendance. Hazardous work is prohibited for under-18s. The ILO’s account of Egypt’s child-labour legislation identifies these provisions. An agricultural exclusion in the 2003 Labour Law does not itself establish unrestricted permission to employ children.

Helal says employers of children killed in unsafe transport or work injuries are pursued under occupational-safety provisions rather than for the employment itself. He says proposals for comprehensive amendments addressing safety and transport classifications had not been adopted by the time of publication.

He also argues that there is no sufficiently specific offence covering an employer who forces an injured child to continue working. Existing work-injury penalties, in his view, do not match the dangers children face.

Helal calls for amendments to labour and child-protection laws, stronger prohibitions on child employment and clear regulation of agricultural work to protect children from dangerous conditions and excessive hours.

Hisham El Hosary, chair of parliament’s Agriculture Committee, takes a different view of enforcement. He considers unsafe transport, underage agricultural employment and forcing injured children to work clear legal violations. Employers must comply with the legal minimum age and face deterrent penalties for employing underage children, he says.

El Hosary refers to a European Union delegation’s visit to jasmine fields in Gharbia. Companies importing Egyptian jasmine, he says, required producers not to use children in harvesting and provided support intended to prevent underage employment.

The reporter contacted Abdel Wahab Khadr, head of public relations at the Ministry of Labour, as well as the social insurance authority’s public-relations department. No responses to the questions had been received by publication. Informed consent was obtained from all sources interviewed for this investigation.

This investigation was produced through the “Qayd Maghoul” fellowship of Women Who Won the War.