CAIRO — Every year, millions of donated food boxes, known as “Ramadan cartons,” are distributed across Egypt throughout the month, circulated from individuals to small charitable organizations to large entities, including government bodies.
Ramadan boxes represent the informal social version of in-kind support, after government-provided in-kind support was replaced by cash transfers in 2014 in line with the adoption of austerity policies.
However, in the same way that official in-kind food assistance disappeared, this informal version may face a similar fate amid exceptional inflation rates.
The surge in food inflation rates, particularly in recent months, has deeply impacted the provision of Ramadan food boxes. Egypt now has one of the highest food inflation rates in the world, which has caused changes in the quality and quantity of food items included in the boxes over the years, while some items have been eliminated altogether.
Speaking to Mada Masr, individuals involved in the distribution of Ramadan boxes have reported a decline in donations and an increase in the number of those in need.
A dwindling number of boxes distributed
For most of her life, Salma* and her family distributed Ramadan boxes in the city of Shebin al-Kom in Monufiya. “This year, my family distributed boxes in December as alms for my father’s recovery. At that time, I bought about 50 cartons worth of groceries for around LE6,000. When I went to buy the same ingredients before Ramadan, it cost us LE17,650,” she said.
Salma has not changed the carton’s contents: two kgs each of rice, flour and sugar; a kg each of lentils, fava beans and black-eyed peas; half a kg of starch; a can of vegetable ghee or two bottles of oil; and a chicken. However, the cost of a single box jumped from approximately LE480 in December last year to LE908 before Ramadan in early March.
Despite collecting the usual funds from friends, family and a wider community for the annual Ramadan box donations, her calculations indicate that the number of boxes she can distribute this year will not exceed 100, compared to 120 cartons last year.
“Donations this season are very weak — the weakest we have ever seen.”
The director of a civil association, who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity to ensure safety for themselves and the neighborhood where the association operates, echoed the same sentiment about the dwindling number of boxes. “I had to buy [the box’s components] before Ramadan, so I did so in the middle of December and January. If I hadn’t done it at that time, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the price hikes,” said Osama*, the association director.
But despite Osama’s relative success in securing his association’s box distribution activity by avoiding the annual price surges before Ramadan, the number of boxes prepared for distribution will likely not exceed 1,000 this year, compared to 3,000 last year
“The box’s composition has changed,” he added. “Last Ramadan, we collected donations for two models. The first box included two kgs each of sugar and rice, two 700-ml oil bottles and one kg of pasta. The second box included the same ingredients, in addition to one kg of meat. This year, we had to introduce a third option consisting of one kg each of sugar, pasta and rice; a bottle of oil; and a cheese carton from those that were donated to us. The small model now dominates the majority of donations.”
Fewer donations from larger associations
The significant price difference between December 2023 and the beginning of Ramadan in March, coupled with decreased donations, has affected both Osama’s and Salma’s charity work.
For the first time, Salma’s family’s sole partner in their charitable activity, her father’s cousin, withdrew from participating. They were able to make up for the shortfall by bringing in six of her friends living in the United Kingdom.
As for Osama’s association, to secure this year’s food distribution initiative, they had to redirect some donations originally made to the organization’s other charitable activities, such as extending clear water pipelines to homes, toward the Ramadan box initiative.
“Donations this season are very weak — the weakest we have ever seen,” said Osama. “The reason is that people are no longer reaching the minimum threshold for Zakat,” he explained. Osama is referring to the minimum annual savings subject to Zakat, almsgiving in Islam, levied at 2.5 percent of the individual’s savings only when they reach the value of 80 grams of gold. “Of course, the amount of savings people have no longer reaches the value of this amount of gold.” In these cases, Osama said, people prioritize their families.
A civil association in the Workers City in Giza’s Imbaba neighborhood faced the same donation crisis.
According to Hanan*, a board member of the association, two main sources contributed to the association’s annual provision of Ramadan boxes: a major donor and a civil organization acting as an intermediary between Hanan’s association and the Egyptian Food Bank. This practice, common in civil society during Ramadan, involves providing aid that exceeds the capacity of larger and more renowned organizations for smaller ones to distribute.
The Egyptian Food Bank, one of the largest charities in the country, has been given wide breadth by the government to manage the provision of goods in recent years. The availability of these donations to smaller associations depends on the surplus of in-kind or cash donations from larger associations, such as the food bank.
The Workers City association’s major donor withdrew their usual annual donation for Ramadan boxes this year. The intermediary association also said there was a lack of surplus for distribution at the Egyptian Food Bank. Hanan’s association was consequently forced to cancel this year’s box distribution initiative due to the significant rise in food prices.
The most challenging aspect for Hanan was the emotional toll of facing box recipients with the truth, especially since some of them represent a wide circle of her personal acquaintances, given their long-standing relationship over the years.
A change in the “severity of poverty”
In the case of Ahmed*, a volunteer in a student charity group at Tanta University that primarily targets rural areas, donations have not decreased compared to last year. Founded 11 years ago, the group’s network of volunteers is expanding every year as cohorts graduate and continue to donate, and new cohorts join the group’s lists of activists and donors. This year, donations increased by 20 percent.
Despite the increase, the group could only cover the cost of around 50 percent of the cartons they were able to secure last year. The number of boxes dropped from 240 to 115 this year due to the high cost per carton, which rose from LE450 to LE1,000 with the same ingredients. These include four kgs each of rice and pasta; two bottles of oil; one and a half kg each of dates and black-eyed peas; one and a half kgs each of lentils, ghee and cheese; a bag of salt; a bottle of tomato sauce; a quarter kg of tea; and a kg of beans.
Not only did inflation affect the cost of a single carton, it compelled the university group to add two kgs of potatoes to this year’s carton as well. The rise in the price of potatoes to LE15 per kg led to a halt in a standard practice that was followed in villages: rural families who grow potatoes usually distribute part of their yield free of charge to the rest of the families before Ramadan.
The university group had to reevaluate their aid distribution, moving a large number of recipients from the fourth category, the least eligible, to the first and second categories, the most eligible to receive aid, including cartons.
The group categorizes beneficiaries based on need, prioritizing people in extreme poverty, followed by others based on their assigned points.
“Each student knows which cases in their village are in need, since most of us are villagers. We make an Excel sheet where we record the cases and consider specific elements, such as if someone is incapacitated, the father is deceased, and so on,” Ahmed explained.
“This is the first year we deliver cartons to families with employed breadwinners.”
“We assign each need a point, which adds up to ten, and then we assign each case a number of points. From the total, we sort the names into four categories of beneficiaries: The first category is those in extreme poverty, which is what we mainly try to cover with the donations for the whole month. If there is a surplus of boxes, we give them to those who have the highest values from the second category, and so on, until the donations collected are used up. We try to identify the villages that fall outside the scope of existing charities because those do not receive any kind of support, which is also taken into account during the categorization process.”
This change in the “severity of poverty,” so to speak, was also noticed by Salma. “This is the first year we deliver cartons to families with employed breadwinners. Every year, cartons would mainly go to migrant workers and widows. It’s easy to ask and find out here because everyone knows each other. This year, I found out that there were two families in need of the cartons: one of a state employee in the education sector and the other of an employee at the city council. I thought when I knocked on the door that they would kick me out and refuse the donation, but they accepted it. This is a new situation for us because these people were living well until recently.”
As for Hanan, from the charity association in Imbaba, the increasing severity of poverty was evident to her from earlier on, as she received inquiries about the boxes months prior to Ramadan. “People started calling me in the month of Rajab [two months before Ramadan] to ask about the cartons, as if they knew what was coming,” she said, referring to her association having to cancel their carton distribution initiative this year.
Hanan’s association turned to an alternative solution after canceling their annual initiative.
At the association’s headquarters, a small ground-floor apartment in one of the neighborhood’s buildings, Mada Masr correspondents saw large, cheap aluminum trays and containers filled with pasta and kofta ready for distribution. Hanan was helping Sabah*, one of the volunteers, prepare the kofta, thus guaranteeing Sabah not only the religious reward for helping impoverished individuals break their fast but also her right in Islam to receive meals for her family based on Sharia, which deems those who collect, process, or distribute Zakat or alms as eligible to receive them.
Daily distribution of hot meals
In previous Ramadan seasons, pre-prepared iftar meals meant for distribution on a daily basis were primarily focused on the religious deed of helping others break their fast rather than meeting the needs of the association’s assistance recipients. Providing the hot meals as aid is related to the Islamic concept of “kaffaret al-iftar,” based on which each meal represents an act of expiation for an individual who did not fast during Ramadan.
Meals were distributed to passersby in surrounding streets at the time of the Maghrib call to prayer, regardless of the severity of their poverty, as well as to those who came to the association’s headquarters to request them, and to a limited number of the most eligible cases registered in the association’s databases based on its criteria.
One such beneficiary is Sabrin*. She arrives two hours before iftar at the association’s headquarters to receive her allotted meals — the only form of support she receives following this year’s discontinuation of the customary Ramadan boxes. “[The box] used to be [big]. It included two kgs of rice and sugar, a bag of dates, a bag of black-eyed peas, four bags of pasta, a bottle of oil and a bag of ghee,” she said.
With the absence of the food cartons, the focus has shifted toward the daily distribution of hot meals. A posted schedule dictates the days and beneficiaries, most of whom can only obtain the meals on two days of the week, with a few exceptions, including Sabrin, who is granted daily access to the meals.
The ingredients of the pre-prepared meals have also changed. “For example, we now rely on pasta instead of rice,” Hanan said as the distribution of pasta on plates was in full swing with iftar time fast approaching. “We have rice, but rice needs vegetables and meat, and the issue, of course, is the meat,” she added. “But pasta works with kofta, liver and sausage. How much can we get meat for these days? Over LE300. And it’s imported meat as well.”
An increase in donations from sponsors
Ashraf*, the association’s director, who arrived at the headquarters to try to find a way to “cram” six more meals into the menu with Hanan, interjected his deliberations to tell Mada Masr the extent of the threat to what remains of the charitable activity: “Last year, we were able to spend around LE9,000 a day on meals on average, but this year we only have LE5,000.”
A senior official at Sonaa al-Kheir, an organization within the National Alliance for Civil Development Work, said that the alliance’s general policy this year has also been to rely more on hot meals and charity marquees at the expense of cartons, due to the higher cost of cartons.
“Cartons cost more if we calculate the cost of packing, printing and transportation, but with charity marquees, individuals come to us. The hot meals are distributed in the organization’s branches in each governorate, which also reduces costs, unlike the cartons, which are centrally distributed from the main headquarters in Cairo to the governorates,” the official said.
But the official’s statement paints a very different picture than the reality of this year’s Ramadan cartons initiative at his organization, as they were actually able to increase the number of cartons from 75,000 last year to 200,000 this year. They were also able to maintain the same components of the cartons compared to last year, despite the increase in the cost of a 15-kg carton containing dry foodstuffs from LE250 last year to LE460 this year.
Due to its large purchasing volume, Sonaa al-Kheir is able to purchase food at relatively low prices because it does so through tenders, the source said. The organization’s membership in the National Alliance for Civil Development Work allows for easy distribution in the governorates with the help of the local administration, allowing it to conduct case research and rank families in terms of eligibility for the cartons, the source explained.
During the Egyptian Family Iftar in April 2022, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that state agencies and institutions were directed to implement the National Alliance for Civil Development Work initiative, telling the public that he had instructed them to support the initiative to provide social protection to nine million families. Mada Masr published a report in February of last year on how the alliance is linked to the political regime’s desire to “nationalize” civil work.
It is a decline within a decline — a decline in the distribution of food commodities and in the abilities of officially supported and unsupported associations to distribute the cartons.
The increase in Sonaa al-Kheir’s carton distribution only reflects an increase in donations from sponsors, including state-owned Telecom Egypt, which is funding 150,000 cartons within its 750,000 Ramadan carton program, and a number of banks, most of which joined the list of sponsors this year, according to the senior official, who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.
Without disclosing a rate, he explained that there has been a decrease in individual donations, which he said only fund a marginal portion of the cartons’ costs. Many individual donors have become reluctant to donate, he explained, for reasons related to the perception of the alliance as a political entity affiliated with the state.
The alliance’s founding law allows public state-affiliated entities to join, which effectively gives it the image of a state-affiliated or aligned entity.
By the end of Ramadan, the total number of cartons distributed by all the alliance’s associations could reach almost two million, the source said.
Although the figure is huge, the decline in the number of cartons distributed this year is still clear relative to last Ramadan’s Shoulder-to-Shoulder initiative, which at the time said that six million cartons were delivered through the alliance’s associations and under the president’s auspices.
It is a decline within a decline — a decline in the distribution of food commodities, both in their continuous official form of food subsidies and in their intermittent charitable form, which at times appeared to be a temporary substitute for continuous supply, and a decline in the abilities of officially supported and unsupported associations to distribute the cartons, even if joining the alliance facilitates the task of charitable work in general.
*Pseudonyms
