Following the 25 January 2011 uprising that toppled the Mubarak regime in Egypt, there has been a lot of pressure to increase Egypt’s meager science annual research budget. Over the following two years it rose from 0.25% to 0.4% of GDP, reaching a total of 1.3 billion Egyptian pounds (~US$186 million).
However, the leading Egyptian Arabic daily newspaper Al-Ahram is today reporting that, according to documents released by the National Investment Bank, the ministry of scientific research has returned 82% of its annual budget unspent. This means that the ministry has failed to implement 82% of its announced fiscal year plan. Additionally, this also means that the ministry’s annual budget will surely be slashed next year since they failed to spend the majority of it this year.
Maged El-Sherbiny, president of the government-sponsored think tank Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT) and who was previously the vice-minister of scientific research, says the performance of the ministry has been marred by poor planning this year. “This never happened before, we never returned unspent money in previous years. We would always have meetings five months before the end of the fiscal year and reevaluate which projects need money and we would modify our plan accordingly.”
The ministry’s budget is supposed to cover dozens of governmental research centres across the country as well as pay wages for thousands of researchers working at these institutes.
While less than a month ago Nadia Zakhary, the minister of scientific research, had announced there will be no decrease in the R&D budget in the fiscal year, she went back and acknowledged there will indeed be a decrease, but told media outlets it will not affect wages nor actual science research being conducted.
In reply to the accusations of badly managing their budget, the ministry issued a statement that it had spent “all the money that the National Investment Bank has made available of its budget.”
El-Sherbiny, however, says that is not entirely accurate. “The bank needs proper documents to prove how the money it is releasing from the budget is being used. So without these documents it will not be giving out money. The truth is the ministry has failed to present these documents and that is why they did not get the money.”