Egypt - United Nations Development Programme

II) Trajectory of NHDR: production, ownership and
dissemination
A) Production
After the publication of two issues of the global HDRs, the UNDP country office in Cairo
convened, in late 1991, a meeting of a group of enlighted Egyptian intellectuals from
different political and spiritual background (liberals, marxists, seculars and islamists), to
review the modalities of operationalizing the HD concept in the Egyptian context. The
group recommended getting in touch with the semi-governmental institute INP, which
included a board of directors chaired by the Minister of Planning, and regrouping a pool
of highly qualified professors in different fields of social sciences.
The INP proposed, through a memo addressed to the Minister of Planning, to be
in charge of the preparation of the NHDR, with technical and financial support from
UNDP. INP also formed an advisory committee headed by the director of the institute,
which included other selected institute staff (the project coordinator and the
administrative officer), a UNDP representative and an international consultant.
Contributors of the background papers were selected from a pool of qualified professors
from INP as well as from outside. A steering committee was also established to
streamline the production process and oversee the daily management of the project.
Since Egypt’s first HDR, published in 1994, until the most recent in 2005, nine
reports have been published with varying time lapses. As mentioned in the introduction,
one may distinguish five different areas of these reports: i) the first area covered the first
two reports (1994 and 1995) and introduced the concept of HD, the HDI, participatory
development and the 20/20 approaches; ii) the second area (1996 and 1997/98) focused
on poverty and social spending; iii) the third covered specific issues such as education
(1998/99) and globalization (2000/01); iv) the fourth area (2002/03 and 2004) focused on
the issue of decentralization; and iv) the fifth area, covering the most recent 2005 report,
proposes to policy makers a new pro-poor, pro-growth social contract, and a vision for
Egypt until 2015.
The production process of the HDR may be characterized by three features: (a)
All nine reports are of a high caliber and two of them have had a strong impact at the
national as well as local levels – the ‘Poverty’ (1996) and the ‘Decentralization’ (2004)
reports; (b) since the publication of the first report in 1994, an HDI was calculated at both
the national and local (governorate) levels, thus stressing regional disparities and
preparing the ground for the publication of a series of governorate human development
reports (GHDR), as will be mentioned at a later stage; and (c) special attention was given
to data accuracy and data collection. Indeed, updating of data bases, development and
refinement of indicators, and undertaking of special surveys for specific reports were
implemented in close cooperation with the Information Decision Support Center and
CAPMAS. For example, a semi participatory assessment survey on people’s perception
of poverty was conducted in connection with the poverty report in 1996. Similarly, a field
15