After a decade of slow economic growth Egypt's rate of age composition of poor households. The results show growth recovered in the late 1990s, averaging more than that average household expenditures rose in the second five percent a year. But the effect of this growth on half of the 1990s and the poverty rate fell from 20 poverty patterns has not been systematically examined percent to less than 17 percent. But, in addition to the using consistent, comparable household datasets. In this ongoing divide in the urban-rural standard of living, a paper El-Laithy, Lokshin, and Banerji use the rich set of new geographicaUlregional divide emerged in the late unit-level data from the most recent Egyptian household 1990s. Poverty was found predominantly among lesssurveys (1995-96 and 1999-2000) to assess changes in educated individuals, particularly those working in poverty and inequality between 1995 and 2000. Their agriculture and construction, and among seasonal and analysis is based on household-specific poverty lines that occasional workers. These groups could suffer the most account for the differences in regional prices, as well as from the slowing economic growth evident after 1999differences in the consumption preferences and size and 2000.This paper-a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to understand the impact of economic growth on poverty. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818

Since its inception in 1991, the Egyptian Social Fund for Development (SFD) has spent about US$600 million supporting microcredit, and financing community development and infrastructure. Applying propensity-score matching using household survey data for 2004/05, this paper finds that SFD programmes have had clear and measurable effects, in the expected direction, for the six programmes considered here: education, health, potable water, sanitation, roads, and microcredit. SFD road projects generate benefits that, by some estimates, exceed their costs, as do health and potable water interventions; this is less evident for programmes in education and sanitation. SFD support for microcredit is strongly pro-poor; the other programmes analysed here appear to have a more modest pro-poor orientation.impact evaluation, Egypt, social fund, propensity score matching, microcredit,

The Impact Evaluation Series has been established in recognition of the importance of impact evaluation studies for World Bank operations and for development in general. The series serves as a vehicle for the dissemination of findings of those studies. Papers in this series are part of the Bank's Policy Research Working Paper Series. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

This paper aims to evaluate the poverty situation in the unplanned areas in Cairo as a case study. The unplanned areas, which are considered low-income areas, make up the majority of Cairo, and they have attracted the interest of policymakers and researchers because of their huge size and the political upheavals that have occurred since the 1990s. However, there have been no studies on poverty in these areas owing to a lack of data. The originality of this paper lies in employing three concepts of poverty: consumption-based poverty, a multidimensional poverty index (MPI), and subjective poverty. By using these different concepts of poverty, this paper contributes to the understanding of the nature of poverty and the interrelationship between these three measures of poverty in Greater Cairo. The main finding is that the three types of poverty are different. Households can be poor according to the MPI measure or can consider themselves to be poor, even though they are not objectively poor on the consumption-based measure. This implies that policies aiming at improving living standards in these areas should address and design strategies according to the types of poverty that are prevalent.

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