Cairo, 20 April 2015 – Under the auspices of H.E. Dr. Hala Youssef, Minister of Population, the Center for Economic and Financial Research Studies (CEFRS) at Cairo University in cooperation with the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA held today a discussion on the findings of the joint study “Cost -Benefit Analysis of Egypt Family Planning Program, 2014- 2050"

This study comes as a follow up of an earlier study conducted by the Policy Project (Chao, 2005) aimed to demonstrate the financial benefits and costs of family planning programs in Egypt, and to help governments in their decision to allocate their scarce resources to such programs. This earlier study measured the financial benefits and costs of family planning programs in Egypt over a thirty years period (2000-2030), and compared its monetary costs to the monetary benefits in terms of reduced levels of social services required at lower levels of fertility, or in other words the savings in government expenditures on social services.

The study at hand gains its importance from the recent significant increase of the population rates, and aims to update the estimation of the benefits and costs of the family planning program in Egypt. It is noteworthy that this report extends the projections timeframe to more than thirty years (2014-2050), to align the timespan to the National Strategy for Family Planning in Egypt. The study relied on the actual expenditure on social services according to the Egyptian budget for the fiscal year 2012/2013.

This study aims to estimate the impact of family planning programs on government expenditures on social services including: health, education, housing, and food subsidies. It compares the reductions in government social services spending as a result of family planning programs to the costs of family planning services; to show the financial benefits of the family planning programs that can be used in improving the quality of social services.

The report estimated the number of births averted due to the family planning program at more than 43 million births for the period (2014-2050), and measured the cost for family planning program at around 8 billion EGP during that period. The study concluded that the average return on each Egyptian Pound spent on the family planning program, is 56.12 EGP for the period (2014-2050). Worth mentioning that the results of this study reflects only on the direct monetary returns of investing in family planning which is only a part of the societal benefits that this investment will bring.

This high benefit-cost ratio suggests that continuing a successful family planning program would help the Egyptian government as it will be able to use the saving in the general expenditure on social services in the improvement of the quality of social services provided in the health, education and housing sectors.

The study shows that a family planning program in Egypt is a financial investment with a high internal rate of return and should be implemented in order to provide extra resources and funding to improve the quality of social services in Egypt.