Egypt Demographics Population   71,200,000 Population Under 15   36% Maternal Mortality Ratio (Deaths per 100,000 live births)   170 Total Fertility Rate (Avg. no. of children born to a woman during her lifetime)   3.5 Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (Use Among Married Woman 15-49, Modern Methods)   54% Source: Population Reference Bureau. 2002. World population data sheet. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau.

Egypt

TAHSEEN SIHITNA BI TANZEEM USRITNA (TAHSEEN) is a seven-year USAID-funded population project, which was approved by the Government of Egypt on October 1, 2002, and is scheduled to end in 2009. Its goal is to provide the assistance needed to solidify three decades' worth of USAID's family planning/reproductive health investments, leave a sustainable RH/FP program that provides quality services to all who want and need them and help Egypt take its final steps in reaching replacement level fertility by 2015. To achieve this goal, the project will have to address and resolve four challenges, which remain despite the enormous progress of the last 20 plus years:

• Focus its service delivery assistance on underserved and high-risk populations and those in hard-to-reach geographical areas. A final effort is needed to help provide services to those who are the hardest to reach and whose participation will be necessary, if the program is to be sustainable.
• Ensure that the FP/RH program that will continue after USAID's phase-out, reflects a culture of quality services for every client, which will both stimulate demand and contribute to a more efficient utilization of facilities. This challenge remains, despite excellent progress on quality improvement in previous years, and so it remains an important part of the problem TAHSEEN was designed to solve.
• Strengthen the policy environment and the management and logistics systems needed to support a sustainable FP/RH program. This is an area where persistent barriers remain and can most easily obstruct achievement of the program's objectives.

• Create sustainable shares for all sectors--public, commercial and NGO--in the provision of FP/RH services. The public sector's share is currently rising, but it is highly unlikely that it alone can provide the bulk of such services over the long term, especially in the absence of substantial donor support.

• Use different approaches to impact health outcomes through, for instance, focus on gender, youth, and different service provider sectors.
• Establish linkages to other programs such as education, economics/micro-credit and agriculture to improve health benefits.
• Coordinate with other donors in the health field such as UNFPA, UNICEF and others to make best use of Egypt's national resources.
• Bring together different cooperating agencies to participate in the planning of activities to be implemented in year one, as this has in the past seemed to be a successful process.

Contact Information:

The CATALYST office/TAHSEEN project

53 Manial Street, 4th Floor
El Rodah, Cairo, Egypt 11451
Tel: 20-2-532-5065/6/7/8
Fax: 20-2-532-5324

Country Representative in Cairo:

Damianos Odeh, PhD
E-mail:

Contact in Washington, D.C.:

Graciela Salvador-Davila
Senior Reproductive Health Advisor
The CATALYST Consortium
1201 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 501
Washington, DC 20036
tel:  202-775-1977
fax: 202-775-1988

E-mail: