The Baheya Foundation for Early Detection and Treatment of Breast Cancer on Sunday distanced itself from providing charitable services to Sudanese migrants and refugees after social media pages and accounts launched an incitement campaign targeting Sudanese refugees.
The episode reflects a broader pattern in which charitable and service organizations have come under pressure over programs for refugees and migrants, amid growing anti-refugee rhetoric that rights advocates say increasingly shapes public debate in Egypt.
The foundation said in an “important” statement that donations from Egyptians are used exclusively for Egyptian women and that non-Egyptian women receive treatment through a “paid economic services department.”
The backlash followed an announcement by the medical office at the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo about a partnership with Baheya to provide early detection and treatment services to Sudanese women and ease their financial burden.
Part of the attack came from a Facebook page called Egyptian Nationalism. In a post, the page claimed the agreement amounted to “wasting Egyptians’ donations on non-Egyptians” and demanded that migrants be denied treatment.
Rather than defend access to treatment as a universal human right, Baheya stressed that services for non-Egyptians are paid for by embassies and sponsoring organizations through a separate department, while donated funds are reserved for “Egyptian women who cannot afford treatment.” It also repeated its slogan, “Behind every Egyptian woman.”
Nour Khalil, a rights activist and director of the Refugees Platform in Egypt, said Baheya’s response reflected a wider pattern in which charitable and service institutions retreat in the face of anti-refugee rhetoric, reinforcing distinctions based on nationality instead of defending everyone’s right to health care.
Khalil told Al Manassa that the Baheya Hospital episode was an extension of anti-foreigner rhetoric that has been steadily fueled since 2021. He said the danger was that this rhetoric had “unfortunately found support in official statements by state officials.”
He pointed to repeated official statements, particularly by the president and the foreign minister, about rising refugee numbers, as well as statements by other officials blaming refugees for economic crises.
As one example, he cited remarks in 2023 by Ahmed Abu El-Yazid, then chairman of the Delta Sugar Company, blaming Sudanese people for a sugar shortage.
Khalil said such rhetoric helped create a charged social environment and normalize treating foreigners, particularly dark-skinned Africans, as “criminals or an economic burden.”
ٍtate and pro-government media had also played an inflammatory role by linking refugees’ presence to the economic crises facing Egyptians, while civil society organizations that could challenge and debunk such misinformation have faced sweeping restrictions on their work, Khalil added.
Health care and charitable institutions, he said, reinforce that rhetoric when they respond to such campaigns by stressing that free services are restricted to a particular nationality rather than challenging the premise of the attacks.
“This dangerous populist rhetoric can’t be confronted by hiding from it or letting it pass, because it keeps spreading and it’s frightening,” Khalil said, arguing that health care providers should instead confront it openly.
“If you decide to receive non-Egyptians, you have to state your position clearly: Health care is a guaranteed right for every human being regardless of nationality, rather than justifying it by saying they pay for it in economic services departments.”
He added that confronting such rhetoric also required the state and its officials to stop inflating refugee numbers and the cost of hosting them, “which has become a major issue the government feels it has to raise every few months.”
That pressure has targeted other organizations as well. A few months ago, the campaigns extended to the presidential Decent Life initiative after it held an introductory meeting with the UN Refugee Agency to discuss ways to economically empower refugees using foreign grants allocated to the agency at no cost to the state treasury.
The campaign against Decent Life then reached pro-government television. Presenter Ahmed Moussa, on his “Ala Mas’ouliyati” program on Sada El Balad TV, fiercely attacked the initiative, asking, “Decent Life is talking about integration. Integration for whom? Decent Life was created for the Egyptian people, not foreigners!” He claimed refugees consume “$10 billion and share the monorail, electricity and water with us.”
Sada El Balad’s management was later forced, under outside instructions, to delete more than half an hour of the episode and remove social media posts carrying inflammatory headlines after Moussa’s comments triggered attacks and calls to stop donating to the presidential initiative. Decent Life subsequently disabled comments on its official page.
