egypt on one side: gated communities (compounds), international schooling, malls and maybe even a home in sahel
egypt on the other side: national (public or language schools), less fun things to do, struggling to live every month etc
Sounds like everywhere in the world. I also don’t think about Egypt a lot unless it’s about ancient history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_inequality
Eh, GINI coefficient is 28.5 according to the World Bank, based on Wikipedia. Egypt isn’t that high globally in terms of income inequality.
That being said, my understanding is that Egypt is a great example of a country with a population density that isn’t, if you look at the country as a whole, all that high…but internal to the country, the population is highly concentrated around a few specific very dense areas. So it might be that wealthy areas are geographically very close to poor areas, and that might be unusual to Egypt.
goes looking for a population density map of Egypt.
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/f69a91ad-ee59-4b9b-b73a-695f5cc5b3d2.jpeg
Yeah, so everyone lives up and down the Nile.
goes looking
It’s also got a fairly-high population density too, just not top of the shelf there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
Wikipedia ranks it as 99 out of 242 on population density.
Okay since this didn’t get much answers, I’m gonna just say this:
Income inequality is common in every society, unless you live in some small anarchist commune or something
I don’t know much about Egypt, but what you describe reminds me of where I was born, People’s Republic of China.
There is this system called Hukou, or Household Registration. This Hukou system is a registry of where your ancestry is. So, for example, my parents are from villages within 台山 (Taishan), which is a rural area, very poor compared to the cities. At first, movements were restricted, people weren’t allow to migrate outside of where their Hukou is registered, but later they relaxed the rules and allowed migration. So then, my parents moved to 广州 (Guangzhou), which is like one of the top 5 cities in mainland China. Because of this Hukou system, their rights were restricted. I was born in Guangzhou, but my Hukou was still had to be registered where my parents were, in Taishan. Because my Hukou was not in Guangzhou, I was not allowed to go to public school there, even though my parents have an apartment unit in Guangzhou and we lived there. Any social benefits that you might get would not be accessible.
In the United States of America, where I currently live, the there are still similar occurances. For example, all the good schools are in places where property and rent is expensive. If you find cheap housing, then the schools around that area are horrible, and underfunded, lots of bullying.
So… I get it. You aren’t alone.
