{"id":15554,"date":"2026-05-15T13:04:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T11:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=15554"},"modified":"2026-05-19T20:40:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T18:40:04","slug":"chool-nutrition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/chool-nutrition\/","title":{"rendered":"Egypt’s School Nutrition Budget Gives Each Student 3 Cents a Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

A student at a school in the village of Nazlet al-Masharega in Beni Suef governorate brought her meal to school: a bag of fava beans and two loaves of bread. Mohamed al-Fawli, an undersecretary at the Ministry of Education, passed by and mocked her in front of her classmates. The incident spread widely, forcing him to apologize<\/a> to the girl and her family. But the question that remained after the apology: the government allocates 7 billion Egyptian pounds ($134.6 million) annually to school nutrition. So where does this money go?<\/p>\n

This is what MP Ahmed Bilal al-Barlasi demanded an answer to in a briefing request<\/a> submitted to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, addressed to the Prime Minister and the Education Minister, arguing that what happened was not an individual error but a symptom of a deeper flaw in the school nutrition system.<\/p>\n

Al-Barlasi linked the student’s experience of being mocked during an inspection tour to the government’s announcement of allocating approximately 7 billion Egyptian pounds ($134.6 million) annually to provide hundreds of millions of meals to approximately 19.5 million students, questioning the absence of any visible impact of this system in schools. He criticized the continued dependence of families on providing daily food for students, in the context of worsening economic conditions and the absence of any government role, raising questions about the efficiency of implementation, and noting that the incident raises suspicions of public money being wasted.<\/p>\n

Al-Barlasi was not alone in raising the question. MP Bassam al-Sawwaf submitted a similar briefing request, calling for a review of the nutrition system and the mechanisms for selecting educational leadership. MP Mahmoud Najeeb Meshal submitted a third request, saying: “The girl did not deserve to be embarrassed. Those who deserve it are the executives who should be asking themselves: why did this girl need to do that in the first place, given that there is a school nutrition program on which millions are spent annually?”<\/p>\n

In a briefing request<\/a> addressed to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education and Technical Education, the MP said that the incident reveals the failure of Egypt’s school nutrition system to provide students with a minimum level of nutritional needs, especially in light of rising living costs, which makes it necessary to reassess the system not only in terms of coverage, but also in terms of quality, continuity, and the extent to which it reaches those most in need.<\/p>\n

Finance Minister Ahmed Kouchouk had announced<\/a> last April the allocation of 7 billion Egyptian pounds ($134.6 million) for school nutrition within the new general budget for the fiscal year 2026\/2027, with the aim of providing approximately 660 million meals for around 19.5 million students. However, reality reveals a wide gap between the financial allocations and their actual implementation.<\/p>\n

School nutrition allocations<\/a> fell in the 2024\/2025 budget to 6.1 billion Egyptian pounds ($117.3 million), compared to 6.6 billion Egyptian pounds ($126.9 million) in 2023. The average per-student allocation in 2024 reached 467 Egyptian pounds ($8.98) for the entire school year, compared to 494 Egyptian pounds ($9.50) the previous year. The Ministry of Education also faced a funding deficit<\/a> of 1.9 billion Egyptian pounds ($36.5 million) during fiscal year 2025\/2026 to cover the actual needs of the school nutrition sector.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to official data<\/a>, the number of schools benefiting from nutrition at the kindergarten stage reached only 18,306 schools, with 32,331 schools at the primary level, 2,931 at the preparatory stage, 388 at the secondary stage, 436 at the technical secondary stage, and 1,048 special education schools benefiting from nutrition in 2023.<\/p>\n

The Ministry distributes meals to kindergarten schools consisting of “1 pack of date-filled biscuits 80g, 1 pack of plain biscuits 80g,” for a total weight of 160g per child, supplied by Silo Foods according to actual student attendance, at a meal price of 12.375 Egyptian pounds ($0.24), according to a publication from Egypt’s Digital Transformation Portal.<\/p>\n