The National Council for Women (NCW) announced that 88% of Egyptians believe that education helps to form a girl’s personality. Meanwhile 83% of the Egyptians believe that education improves girls’ chances of marriage.
In March, the NCW launched the Egyptian Women’s Observatory, which monitors the implementation of the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Egyptian Women 2030. As part of the observatory’s plan for continuous communication with the Egyptians, the observatory has launched a number of opinion polls for the general public through the application of ‘Nasalak’.
Nasalak is a mobile application whereby users can ask questions and answer them through the application. It can collect data from hundreds of user from all over Egypt in a quick and accurate way to ensure the confidentiality of the user.
The NCW, in cooperation with the Egyptian Centre For Public Opinion Research—Baseera, raised a number of questions about the various issues concerning Egyptian women. The results’ reports were announced on Tuesday during a conference.
In a question about the minimum age for marriage, the application provides the user with three alternatives which were 16, 18, or 21 years, likely more than half of the respondents (58%) reported that the minimum age for marriage should be 21 years, 29% responded that it should be 18 years, while only 13% believe that the minimum age for marriage is 16 years-old.
Furthermore, 76% of the respondents said they would reject the girl’s marriage before completing her university education.
Concerning the work of women after marriage, about two-thirds of the respondents confirmed their agreement to the work of women after marriage.
On the issue of reproductive health, a question was asked about the optimal number of children in the family. About 40% of respondents said that the best number of children is two children per family, 26% think the most appropriate is three children per family, 7% see that one child is enough for each household, while 24% responded that the most appropriate number depends on the ability of the family.
On the other hand, two-thirds of respondents said they were aware of state efforts to curb crimes against women, with 70% of females and 64% of males.
Furthermore, over two-thirds of the respondents said that the law criminalising inheritance withholding will help women obtain their rights in inheritance. This percentage rose to 82% among females compared to 63% among males.
Notably, the data were collected by the application in the period from September 2017 to July 2018. The number of responses to the questions ranged between 850 and 1,250 answers from all governorates of Egypt.
