Egypt’s Ministry of Education has removed its annual statistical yearbook on pre‑university education from its website, following an update that renamed the Information Center portal as the Electronic Services Portal.
The annual statistical yearbook contains key data on the number of students, teachers, schools, and classrooms, as well as graduation and dropout rates and other indicators that journalists, researchers, and research centers use to track the state of education in Egypt.
The ministry previously allowed public access to the annual statistical yearbook for pre-university education, which contains key data on the state of education in Egypt.The ministry’s official website still directs users to the “Ministry Information Center Portal,” but the current portal is labeled the “Electronic Services Portal” and offers general services for students, parents, and teachers, with no sign of the annual statistical yearbook section or the previously available databases.
The ministry had published the statistical yearbook for the 2024-2025 academic year in January 2025, reporting 25.8 million students, 62,100 schools, 672,900 classrooms, and 876,400 teachers. At the time, it also announced a link allowing users to access statistics and school dropout rates.
In February, Education Minister Mohamed Abdel-Latif said during a meeting of the House of Representatives’ Planning and Budget Committee that class sizes in public schools no longer exceeded 50 students, down from as many as 200 students in some areas, adding that there was no shortage of teachers for core subjects in public schools. Those claims can be verified against the figures published in the statistical yearbook.
The disappearance of the data from the ministry’s public website raises questions about its policy on access to education information, given that the yearbook is the government’s primary source for tracking class sizes, teacher shortages, school numbers, dropout and pass rates, and disparities across governorates and educational levels.
Article 68 of Egypt’s constitution states that “information, data, statistics, and official documents are the property of the People,” and that access to them is a right guaranteed by the state for every citizen, while obligating the state to make them available transparently.
As of publication, the Ministry of Education had not explained why the data had been removed or whether its disappearance was temporary as part of the website update or reflected a change in its publication policy. Al Manassa contacted the ministry’s spokesperson, Shady Zalata, by phone and WhatsApp for comment, but received no response.
