Egypt’s Development Boom: Built in Their Name, Paid From Their Pockets
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- 6 min read
By Ahmed Fathi
New York, NY: In Egypt, development is everywhere. You can drive on it, cross it, and photograph it from the air.
It transforms into bridges, highways, new cities, presidential inaugurations, and a new administrative capital rising from the desert.
What is harder to capture is the family in the grocery store wondering what to put back, the pensioner counting the cost of medicine, the middle-class household watching its savings dwindle, or the young couple postponing marriage because the future has become too expensive.
That is development too.
Or, perhaps more precisely, this is what happens when development is designed from the top down and paid for from the bottom up.
On September 23, international leaders will meet at the United Nations in New York to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Declaration on the Right to Development. There will be remarks about dignity, equality, participation, and leaving no one behind. That conversation must involve Egypt — not because Egypt has failed to build. It has built plenty. The harder question is whether Egyptians were ever given the chance to define what progress should mean.
Forty years ago, the UN placed human beings at the center of development. People were supposed to participate in it, contribute to it, and benefit from it.
That is where Egypt’s record becomes uncomfortable.
Development in Egypt has often been announced to the public rather than negotiated with it. The state chooses, borrows, builds, and explains afterward. And when citizens question priorities, there is not exactly an open national town hall waiting for them.
Years of arrests, restrictions, and political pressure have weakened Egypt’s opposition. Independent civil society has spent years fighting for space to exist. NGOs have faced restrictive laws, investigations, and funding constraints. Journalists work in an environment where criticism can carry consequences. Political parties operate within limits everyone understands, even when they are not written down.
And then we talk about “participatory development.”
Participation by whom?
Building a Country Without Asking Its Citizens
There is a serious argument that Egypt needed better infrastructure. A country of more than 100 million people needed roads, transport, electricity, housing, and urban expansion.
The real question is priorities.
Who decided which projects had to come first? Who decided how quickly they should move? Who decided how much debt was acceptable? What could have waited? And where could an ordinary Egyptian meaningfully challenge those choices?
Development is not only a technical exercise. It is political.
Every major spending decision reveals something about who holds power. Every budget tells us whose needs are urgent and whose can wait. Every economic adjustment eventually reveals who feels the pain.
In Egypt, much of that pain has reached the household.
The pound has lost much of its value. Prices have risen sharply. Purchasing power has eroded. Things once taken for granted by the middle class increasingly require calculation: a dinner out, private education, healthcare, replacing an appliance, helping children get married, saving anything at all.
These are not abstract luxuries. They are the small measures by which people judge whether their lives are moving forward or backward.
You can tell someone the economy is improving. You can tell them reserves are stronger or that an international lender has approved another review.
But they still have to go home and open the refrigerator.
That is where economic theory meets political reality.
The Endless Demand for Patience
For years, Egyptians have heard variations of the same argument: Have patience. The reforms are necessary. The pain is temporary. The sacrifices will be worth it. Growth will come. Investment will come. Prosperity will follow.
Some of those arguments are legitimate.
Egypt did not start the war in Ukraine. It did not start the war in Gaza. And it certainly did not start the war involving Iran that has shaken the Gulf, disrupted energy markets, and placed some of the world’s most important shipping routes under renewed pressure.
For Egypt, that latest war is not happening safely somewhere else on the map. The consequences travel through oil and gas prices, investment decisions, insurance costs, the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the shipping lanes on which Egypt depends.
Egypt is paying a price for wars it did not start. That should be acknowledged.
But it should not become the all-purpose explanation for hardship at home.
External crises did not design Egypt’s economic model. They did not choose national spending priorities. They did not decide how much debt was acceptable or which mega-projects could not wait. They did not suppress political competition, close civic space, weaken independent oversight, or make it harder for civil society to challenge government decisions.
Those were domestic choices.
And this distinction matters.
A resilient economy should not simply survive the next war, oil shock, or disruption to the Suez Canal. It should also protect ordinary people from becoming the permanent shock absorbers.
Because when every crisis ends at the same kitchen table—through more expensive food, energy, transportation, and shrinking purchasing power—the word “resilience” begins to sound very different depending on which side of that table you are sitting.
That is where economic hardship becomes inseparable from political accountability.
In a healthy public sphere, opposition parties challenge spending priorities. Journalists investigate. Civil society contests decisions. Parliament demands answers. Experts disagree publicly. People organize. Governments sometimes change course.
When those avenues are weakened, poor policy does not disappear.
It simply becomes harder to challenge.
That may be one of the least discussed costs of authoritarian rule. It is not only a human-rights problem. It can become an economic problem too.
The Egypt of the Photograph and the Egypt of the Kitchen Table
In some ways, there are two Egypts.
One is highly visible: new highways, new cities, impressive construction, and large national projects. It appears in official videos. It looks modern. It looks ambitious.
The other sits around the kitchen table.
It talks about prices, school fees, medicine, rent, the cost of meat, and the value of a salary. It wonders whether a son should leave the country, whether a daughter can afford to marry, and whether retirement savings will still mean anything five years from now.
That Egypt rarely appears in development presentations.
But it is the one that matters most.
A right to development that does not improve the security and dignity of ordinary people eventually becomes a slogan.
Development without participation risks becoming something more troubling: a project carried out in people’s names without giving them meaningful ownership of either the choices or the consequences.
Who Gets to Call It Success?
International financial institutions carry responsibility here too. They monitor debt, deficits, currency flexibility, reserves, and reform targets. Those things matter.
But there is something morally incomplete about calling an adjustment program successful while households are still absorbing the pain.
Successful for whom?
Governments measure economies from ministries. Lenders measure them from spreadsheets. People measure them at the grocery store.
Sometimes those three versions of reality do not meet.
The UN’s Declaration on the Right to Development was meant to close that gap. It said the human being was the central subject of development.
Not the state.
Not the lender.
Not the mega-project.
The individual.
A Right, Not a Government Favor
When leaders meet in New York in September, Egypt will be able to point to real achievements. It should.
But tougher questions must also be asked.
Can development be called participatory when meaningful political participation is restricted? Can it be called people-centered when civil society is treated as a threat? Can citizens genuinely shape development when opposition politics are weakened and independent voices operate under pressure?
And can a government claim development success when the people carrying much of the economic burden have so little influence over the choices that produced it?
These are not anti-development questions.
They are precisely the questions the right to development was meant to address.
Egypt has changed enormously. The roads changed. The skyline changed. The currency changed. The economy changed. The political landscape changed too.
And for millions of Egyptians, daily life became harder.
Perhaps the real question forty years later is not whether Egypt developed.
Clearly, it did.
The question is:
Who was development for?
And if ordinary Egyptians were expected to pay for it, sacrifice for it, and live with its consequences, when were they given the right to help define it?