In parallel with the announcement by the Egyptian Minister of Agriculture at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) conference held on June 28 regarding Egypt’s commitment to developing agricultural value chains towards efficiency, inclusiveness, and sustainability, aimed at providing employment opportunities, food security, and serving export goals—the incident on the regional road passing through Monufia Governorate on June 27, which resulted in the death of 18 girls working as seasonal grape harvesters, sheds light on the fragility of this official declaration and the weakness of agricultural value chains in Egypt, particularly the place of women within them, in contrast to the dominance of export and profit considerations.
Continued Marginalization of Female Agricultural Workers Despite Women’s Empowerment Strategies
Women and children constitute a fundamental part of the agricultural workforce in Egypt, whether in regular or seasonal roles, due to the nature of agricultural crops that require delicate handling. This explains the specific focus on these two groups for integration into agricultural value chains, especially with the increasing movement of men from rural areas. Official statistics indicate that women from the informal labor sector represented 32.4% of the agricultural sector in 2022, a figure reaffirmed by the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Women 2030, which noted that the agricultural sector absorbs 25% of women’s capacity in the informal sector.
However, the strategy did not provide adequate care or protection for women working in the agricultural sector. It was more explicit in directing its efforts toward already privileged groups by emphasizing a commitment to empowering women economically within the formal sector—whether public or private—or in entrepreneurship and public institutions, and working on developing women’s skills to expand their employment options and increase their participation in the labor force. In contrast, the strategy merely called for the development of laws and procedures to protect the rights of women working in the informal sector and recommended expanding projects that facilitate the employment of women in different locations within agricultural value chains, including agro-processing.
The strategy fails to provide sufficient support and protection to women involved in agricultural value chains, while simultaneously calling for increased participation. Similarly, the state’s official policies do not reflect a genuine commitment to establishing inclusive and sustainable value chains that serve all contributors—especially women—given their crucial role, as revealed by the regional road incident. The primary and ultimate goal appears to be profit, export, and surplus extraction.
Fragility of Female Labor Within Agricultural Value Chains
Comprehensive and sustainable value chains are intended to serve all stakeholders, including farmers, workers, landowners, traders, and manufacturers, as well as to strengthen the infrastructure of the regions in which these chains and processes exist. They should do so in a balanced and sustainable way, ensuring inclusiveness by enabling all stakeholders to feel they receive a fair share of the added value generated and that they are not subjected to unhealthy working conditions.
Labor is the weakest link in value chains, given the low wages earned and their engagement in the most rudimentary stages of production, which contributes to the low pay. The incident revealed that women continue to be confined to basic roles within agricultural value chains—such as harvesting, collecting, and cutting, and to a lesser extent, in sorting, packing, and agro-processing. This stands in contrast to the efforts promoted by the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Women, which called for the integration of women into more complex processes like agro-industrial production.
The incident also exposed the harsh working conditions faced by seasonal female workers, with a daily wage of 120 Egyptian pounds (approximately 3 USD), a rate that has remained unchanged since 2018 in grape value chains despite inflation, rising prices, and repeated currency devaluations. This wage may appear slightly better considering the victims worked in the packing and sorting stage, as wages are often lower in harvesting and collecting tasks. sometimes dropping to 70 or 80 EGP per day (around 1.5–2 USD), depending on the specific crop or value chain. Notably, these wages are often not paid daily but are accumulated and distributed weekly or bi-monthly. Occasionally, a bonus may be granted during holiday seasons aligned with peak agricultural seasons, sometimes amounting to 500 EGP (around 10 USD).
Despite the National Strategy for the Empowerment of Women recommending since 2017 the enactment of legislation to protect the rights of women working in the informal sector, the new Labor Law – set to enter into force in September 2025 – still fails to provide adequate legal protection to informal and seasonal workers. The law delegates the task of regulating working conditions to the Ministry and administrative bodies, without stipulating legal guarantees or safeguards. It does not require employers to provide formal contracts, a situation that applied to the victims of the incident.
Even under the still-operative Labor Law No. 12 of 2003 – and until the new law takes effect – it appears that administrative bodies are unable to provide the necessary oversight and protection to guarantee the rights of women and minors. The incident revealed that some of the girls working were under the legal working age of 15, in violation of Article 98 of the existing law. Employers had not been issued permits for their employment, nor had they received approval from the relevant labor office. The current law also prohibits children under the age of 18 from working more than six hours per day, yet reports indicate the victims were working for 10 to 12 hours daily on average. Moreover, female agricultural workers are not provided with protective equipment to deal with hazardous working environments, such as those involving chemical pesticides, which pose long-term risks to both public and reproductive health.
Unsafe Transportation for Female Workers and Compensation in Jeopardy
In the absence of protective policies and legal guarantees regulating their employment, there is also no binding requirement regarding safe transportation and work-related travel for female agricultural and seasonal workers. The Monufia incident revealed that factory and export station owners failed to provide transportation to and from workplaces. Instead, transportation is managed by “labor contractors” who handle the issue by using vehicles, many of which are unfit for travel on highways or exceed their passenger capacity, as in the case of the accident where 20 individuals were crammed into a microbus built for only 12 passengers. The choice of such worn-down vehicles aims to cut costs, which are in fact deducted from the workers’ wages, despite the journeys often spanning long distances between governorates in Upper and Lower Egypt. These trips frequently result in accidents and injuries among hired female workers, without any compensation provided.
The Monufia incident also raises serious concerns regarding the credibility of the compensation distributed to victims of informal labor and whether it reaches the rightful recipients. While compensation was announced by the Ministries of Social Solidarity and Labor in solidarity with the victims’ families, along with donations from local community members, recent reports suggest that either the compensation has not yet been disbursed or that local authorities have intervened to deduct portions of it from families, up to half the total amount, under pressure to “donate” it back to the state to help build a school in the village. These coercive practices are compounded by a security-heavy response to the tragedy, including restrictions on communication between victims’ families and the media, aiming to suppress public discussion about the working conditions and poverty in the village that forced these young women to accept such dangerous and exploitative jobs.
As women and minors occupy a central position in agricultural value chains and are forced to work and travel under such precarious conditions, data and recurring incidents reveal that they constitute a large proportion of road accident victims, being among the primary users of rural transportation to reach their places of work and production.
Agricultural Value Chains Without Infrastructure Governance
On another level, the concept of sustainable value chains is rooted in the principle of governance, to coordinate and regulate all stages and interactions among stakeholders and ensure that everyone involved in a value chain benefits. The Monufia incident further revealed the absence of such governance.
While the state and its administrative bodies are expanding industrial zones in the Delta and various governorates – such as in the case of Monufia Governorate – the infrastructure in these areas, particularly the regional road, has effectively been removed from the oversight of public authorities such as governorates, municipalities, or ministries like the Ministry of Transport and the General Authority for Roads and Bridges. Instead, it has been handed over to the ownership and management of private companies, specifically the National Roads Company in this case. The company built the road and reaps the financial benefits without fulfilling its responsibility for maintenance, reporting to public authorities, or performing any necessary repairs. Consequently, the road has gone without maintenance for six years since its construction, despite repeated accidents and complaints from citizens and members of parliament representing the governorate.
This reality stands in stark contradiction to the principles of centralized governance, which require close coordination among all contributors in a value chain and a fair distribution of the added value they help generate, whether in the form of wages or decent working conditions. Sustainable value chains also aim to ensure the sustainability of the surrounding environment and infrastructure, and to guarantee the interests of all contributors without prioritizing one party’s gains over others. However, these principles are clearly absent, as export considerations dominate all else, leading directly to the current disaster. The Minister of Transport justified the road damage by attributing it to “overloading,” citing the permission granted for heavy commercial transport to use the same road alongside individual and light transport.
The official approach seems to prioritize keeping these roads open to freight and commercial traffic, in service of both domestic and international exports and industrial facilities, while limiting intervention to technical changes such as converting the roads to concrete structures. This directly contradicts sustainability and user protection goals and continues to expose rural women and minor children – key users of these roads – to recurrent danger.
In Light of This, Egyptian Policymakers Should:
- Reconsider the current approach to expanding women’s inclusion in agricultural value chains, aiming instead for a more comprehensive and sustainable model that goes beyond numerical inclusion to ensure their fundamental rights, especially in terms of wages, employment contracts, health insurance, and injury compensation.
- Reassess the legal frameworks and regulations governing informal labor, which largely concerns women, to ensure the clarity of work conditions, rights, and responsibilities.
- Include protective and safety conditions for female workers – especially rural women – in the upcoming National Occupational Health and Safety Strategy.
- Reevaluate the target groups of social protection programs such as Takaful and Karama, and work to expand their reach to include informal female workers, given the extremely low wages that compel families in rural areas to push their children into informal and seasonal work, as the incident revealed, particularly since the girls’ motivation to work was linked to their desire to fund their education.
On the International Cooperation Level:
- Countries importing Egyptian agricultural and industrial products and engaging with the Egyptian market must ensure that the production processes do not violate labor laws, child protection laws, or women’s rights before entering into export and import agreements.
- The impact of IMF-funded women’s empowerment programs in Egypt must be reassessed, especially those aimed at improving the safety of public transportation to help women access jobs. The Monufia incident and others like it show the limited impact of these programs and highlight that women working in vital sectors such as agriculture remain excluded from their benefits.