In Egypt, village youth centers are forcing athletes with disabilities out of sports

Integrating people with disabilities into sports activities in village youth centers appears to be difficult to achieve. For Dr. Mahmoud Yassin, a goalball coach for the blind, it is still only a theoretical notion. He says these centers have no equipment or trained staff, and that those in charge have no understanding of the “psychology” of dealing with disabled athletes.

Yassin points out that these facilities fail to meet even the minimum requirements of people with disabilities, from the design of the entrance to the lack of appropriate training equipment. This means thousands of people living in villages across Egypt are being denied one of their most basic rights: access to sport. It is not only a form of social exclusion, but a violation of both the constitution and the law, which guarantee equality for all in the right to practice sport.

An Unadapted Environment

Such an environment, which is unfit to accommodate athletes with disabilities, drives many of them away from village youth centers, and even to give up sport altogether. One such person is Mahmoud Selim, who took up athletics about ten years ago in his small village of Tukh al-Kheil in Minya Governorate. But he says that before long he was faced with the reality of a village youth center completely lacking the facilities, coaching staff, and even the most basic equipment to suit his disability.

Mahmoud had no choice but to travel to the youth center in the city, 18 kilometres away from his village. The distance made regular training nearly impossible, and his chances of achieving qualifying scores for the national team continued to slip. Eventually, it became too much. After only a short period of practice, he decided to quit the sport altogether.

Khaled Hassan, head of the technical committee for swimming in the Egyptian Blind Sports Association and a former board member of the Paralympic Committee, maintains that the failure to adapt village youth centers to accommodate people with disabilities is an “injustice”, and a significant cause of the decline in the number of disabled athletes in Egypt in recent years.

In a survey of 66 athletes from different governorates and sports, conducted to assess how inadequate facilities at youth and sports centres affect the participation of people with disabilities, more than 80 percent said the centers near their homes had no facilities suitable for their needs. About 73 percent said they faced difficulties accessing suitable sports facilities.

When asked why they stopped participating in sport, more than 80 percent cited the lack of properly equipped sports facilities close to home as the primary reason. The second most common factor was the high cost of practicing sport, followed by the low financial return it offered.

The Story Continues

In the southern Egyptian governorate of Minya, Mahmoud Selim's story did not end when he retired from athletics. For him, sport is more than just a hobby. It is a way of life that can stave off complications caused by his disability. This made him refuse to give up. After some years, he took up individual triathlon, and resolved to pay for the equipment and training himself. He went to look at every youth center in the province, hoping to find one that was both good for sport, and suitable for his disability, but to no avail.

Mahmoud had the financial means to resume his sporting activities, but others are not in that position. He says many people in the provinces end up abandoning sport altogether.

This suffering reflects a broader reality. The rural parts of Egypt have experienced over the last decade successive waves of inflation that have had directly impacted the lives of citizens. Figures show there has been a clear hike in prices, with the annual inflation rate reaching 32 percent in 2017. It then continued to rise at varying rates, reaching 37 percent in 2023 and 27.6 percent in 2024. The price index rose by 63.1 points in 2016 and 231.6 points in 2024, reflecting a cumulative inflation of approximately 267 percent. This means prices are now about 2.7 times higher, significantly increasing the cost of living.

Action in the Senate

The state claims to prioritize athletes with disabilities, but no concrete steps have been taken on the ground to achieve real integration.

In March 2023, the Egyptian Senate debated an information request from Senator Hesham Suweilam regarding the Ministry of Youth and Sports’ policies. The senator asked how the ministry was implementing Article 82 of the executive regulations of Law No. 10 of 2018, which deals with the rights of the disabled. He also questioned what the ministry was doing to promote youth centers and provide suitable places for disabled people to practice sports.

Senator Hisham Suweilam questioned the value of free youth center memberships for people with disabilities when the facilities themselves are inaccessible. He emphasized the need to improve these facilities.

Suweilam explained that his parliamentary action was prompted by what he had witnessed in villages in his home governorate of Menoufia. He had seen a complete lack of equipment for people with disabilities in village youth centers and a failure to provide for their needs. His arguments are backed up by official CAPMAS figures. According to its latest annual report on sports activity in Egyptian sports centers, Menoufia is listed as one of nine governorates where no sport is played by people with disabilities in village youth centers.

Around 91 percent of the participants in our survey agreed that providing suitable facilities for people with disabilities would be a strong incentive for them to continue with or return to sport.

Ali Mahmoud, a disabled competitor in modern pentathlon, a sport comprising five different disciplines: swimming, fencing, horse riding, pistol shooting, and running, at a private club in the capital Cairo, had a different experience. His experience shows clearly what can be achieved by people with disabilities in sports facilities, given the right equipment.

Ali has had the benefit of living in the heart of the capital and of having a family able to afford the costs of his sport. Consequently, he was able to join a well-known private club, where he found what is lacking in many state-run sports organizations. This made things easier for him and enabled him to forge ahead in his career.

A More Complex Crisis

For disabled women, it is even more difficult to practice sport in rural youth centers. Aside from the lack of equipment and resources, they lack privacy or safe spaces.

The statistics are striking. Women account for almost half of Egypt's population with disabilities, yet they make up only 11 percent of disabled athletes.

Mona (“Minnie”) Rashid Bayeet, a blind weightlifter from the village of Shata in Damietta Governorate, says that the youth center in her village has neither the equipment for her as an athlete nor facilities for her as a girl. It has no suitable changing rooms or female toilets, she says, which makes things more complicated for women than for men.

The lack of provision for girls in village youth centers is not limited to facilities alone. It also extends to the absence of female technical staff. Mona points out that her village's youth center has no female trainers, which discourages girls from participating in sports.

Official CAPMAS figures support Mona's observations. The agency’s latest annual report on sporting activity shows that the country’s more than 4,000 rural youth centers have only 1,203 changing rooms in total. These must serve all athletes, able-bodied and disabled, male and female.

On the technical side, CAPMAS reports that there are only 40 female trainers for people with disabilities in all the country’s rural youth centers.

The geographical distribution of these trainers shows a clear imbalance between governorates, with 30 of them – 75 percent of the total - in Giza Governorate alone. By contrast, the governorate of Qena has four trainers, and Qalyubia, Ismailia, and Minya have two each. The rest of the governorates, including Damietta, where Mona is from, have no female trainers at all.

An Incomplete Journey

Mona began her athletic career in 2018, and in just four years achieved remarkable success. She won a silver medal at the World Championships, gold at the African Championships, and was named the continent's best female weightlifter in 2019.

In achieving so much, she had to overcome many obstacles. With no facilities at the youth center in her village, she was forced to regularly travel the 137 kilometres to Ismailia for training sessions.

Mona says that she faced considerable opposition from her family when she started out, because of the lack of privacy at the youth center. But she was able to gradually win them over, especially after she began gaining championship titles.

She highlights the privacy issue as a major barrier. It has prevented many women from taking up sport in the first place. For others, it has forced them to give up entirely. Their environment failed to provide even the minimum level of privacy that girls need to practice sport.

Despite the remarkable achievements she made in a short career, Mona decided to retire. In fact, she was forced to, because the “discouraging” reality she had to cope with put out the hope inside her. The absence of any sports center near her home that could cope with her disability was enough to end her athletic career: “I wanted to continue my career... but I couldn't.”

Several years have passed since the Egyptian state declared the Year of Persons with Disabilities and passed the law setting out their rights.

But the law was shelved and had no tangible impact on the lives of disabled athletes, whose circumstances have not changed over this period. Disabled athletes in rural Egypt, therefore, face a bitter choice: either to go on suffering, or be forced to give up their sport.

Following the principle of the right of reply, we repeatedly attempted to contact Egyptian Ministry of Youth and Sports officials to comment on our findings, but received no response.