Egypt is running out of water. The country now has roughly 500 cubic meters of renewable water per person per year, well below the United Nations’ 1,000-m³ scarcity line. Egypt’s Minister of Irrigation, Hani Sweilam, has been repeating the figure in the media rounds, and the Food and Agriculture Organization describes Egypt as “water-stressed”.
Against this backdrop, the Egyptian Parliament passed the Drinking Water & Wastewater Regulatory Law in late May 2025. The law essentially hands over control of the water infrastructure to private companies on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis. But aside from the law’s many troubling provisions, it lands amid an economic crisis. Inflation was last recorded at 16.2%, a steady increase in prices, a struggling workforce, and stagnant wages that have not remotely kept pace.
The macro frame is an IMF program that has made pricing, state dominance, and “leveling the playing field” core conditions. In other words, the state is yet again rewriting core tenets of its social contract with citizens at a time when household budgets are thinnest and lenders’ conditions are thickest.
Explaining the law’s provisions: what actually changes
Under the new Drinking Water and Wastewater Regulatory Law, regulatory authority has conveniently shifted from the Housing Ministry to a body that reports directly to the Prime Minister. The National Authority for Regulating Drinking Water and Wastewater Services (NARDWWS), established by presidential decree in 2004, is now entrusted with the power to set operator tariffs and consumer prices, and to issue licenses to private companies.
The official draft of the law states: “The National Authority for Regulating Drinking Water and Wastewater Services is a public service entity affiliated with the Council of Ministers.” This affiliation seems to solidify the current regime’s inclination for centralized decision-making, continuing to raise serious questions about the transparency, or lack thereof, in regulatory practices.
On licensing, the law explicitly allows private sector participation in “the construction, management, and operation” of drinking water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, networks, pipelines, and storage tanks. Each license can be up to 15 years, and in exchange, private operators must sell water at government-approved rates. However, the law’s stated aim of cost recovery could lead to profit-driven motives overshadowing the public interest, potentially compromising access to affordable and clean water for vulnerable communities.
The annual regulatory fee is where the law gets creative. According to Article 54, operators are required to pay a small, volume-based annual fee. For the first five years, this fee is set at 1 piaster (EGP 0.01) per cubic meter. After five years, the fee increases by 20 percent each year until it reaches a maximum of EGP 0.02 per cubic meter by the tenth year.
The annual payments are subject to a minimum fee of EGP 25,000 and a maximum fee of EGP 50 million. Some sources have referred to this fee as “2% of the [water] price per cubic meter,” but this is inaccurate. The law specifies that the fee is based on the volume of water produced, not the price. Fees are settled annually based on actual volumes and must be paid through non-cash methods, with the regulator issuing a yearly certificate.
Article 66 pushes for the nationwide implementation of prepaid water meters, where users pay in advance and receive warnings when their balance is low. If their credit runs out, their water supply stops, though official holidays are considered “grace periods” of sorts. As for the prices, they are ultimately set by the government, but since the new law essentially allows for private contracts and, by design, private companies need to make a profit, so costs may eventually rise for households or be absorbed by the state, which would likely reduce expenditure elsewhere.
Many households in Egypt earn low wages and lack protective laws, making it harder for them to cope with rising water costs or service shut-offs. A huge share of workers are informal and excluded from wage laws, which means the people most likely to face shut-offs when their prepaid balance runs dry are also the least able to absorb repeated price bumps.
Finally, the law’s speech-policing clause. Article 73 fines anyone who “promotes rumors or false information by any means” about water quality between EGP 50,000 and 500,000, which ostensibly covers ordinary social media posts, not just newsrooms or journalists.
Egypt’s track record with similar provisions is grim. Since 2018, a media law has treated personal accounts and blogs with 5,000+ followers as “media outlets,” exposing users to prosecution for “false news”; rights groups have documented repeated cases where that label was used to punish online speech. During the pandemic, authorities arrested health workers for allegedly “spreading false news” about COVID-19, underscoring how these laws reach far beyond professional media workers.
Reform by deadline: IMF strings attached and the military’s untouchable empire
Egypt’s 46-month $8 billion International Monetary Fund program is the catalyst to such a law and a calendar that matters. The latest IMF Article IV and Fourth Review Staff Report explicitly repeats calls for reforms around “leveling the playing field,” pricing transparency, and reducing state and military dominance. The fund’s press statements underscore stalled progress on structural reforms and the need to align prices with costs. The Fund also confirmed it is combining the fifth and sixth reviews to give the government more time, which only increases the incentive to show movement in regulated sectors like water.
The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly stated that state and military-owned firms enjoy privileges that crowd out private investment. Credible reporting around the Staff Report notes the continued dominance of state and military firms as a central obstacle to genuine reform; the Staff Report itself references around 97 military-owned companies across multiple civilian sectors. The Cabinet has promised partial sales of assets, but progress is slow and highly curated. However, selling a few stakes while raising utility prices, like water, may be politically easier than confronting tax exemptions, land access, and procurement channels that protect the military’s commercial ecosystem. That’s the trade-off the law sits inside.
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The Jirian City megaproject concentrates that trade-off in one glittering canal. The megaproject in which the military is a partner will divert about 10 million cubic meters/day of Nile water to feed the new desert city’s human-made river. That is roughly 7% of Egypt’s annual Nile quota.
While the Prime Minister describes the megaproject as “boosting land prices through innovative ideas,” when you’re living at ~500 m³ per person, sending up to seven percent of the Nile’s annual volume to a luxury-anchored development is a distributional choice. It redirects water from older delta cities toward real estate, and it will inevitably squeeze the same households the new law is preparing to meter, license, and police.
Treading a thin line
The United Nations recognizes water and sanitation as human rights, which means service must be available, accessible, and affordable for everyone, not just those who can prepay. Prepaid meters aren’t banned, but they cross the line if they lead to people losing water because they cannot load credit; the UN outright states that cutting off service for inability to pay is a retrogression and violates the right to water.
States are expected to guarantee at least a basic essential supply, keep prices affordable, and build a real safeguards lifeline so that “smart” prepayment technology doesn’t become a barrier. And when private firms are involved, governments remain responsible for making sure contracts and profit motives don’t undermine affordability or exclude low-income users’ basic human right to water.
Egypt has been here before, in 2007–08, “thirst protests” erupted over shortages and injustices in allocation. If the new law’s primary ends up leading to higher prices, stricter shut-offs, and fewer safe channels to complain, it will more likely than not reproduce similar dynamics.
The road ahead
The law’s core is institutional plumbing to deliver what lenders want: clear tariff mechanics, a regulator with a Cabinet umbilical cord, and prepayment technology that moves credit risk from utilities to households. It does not tackle Egypt’s deep-rooted structural rot, especially the military’s commercial privileges or the megaproject habit that is about to divert 7% of Nile water to a desert city.
If Egypt wants to make this law a foundation rather than a device to unlock IMF funds and attract private companies to partner with the state, it should guarantee a non-disconnectable human-rights minimum, publish real-time quality and outage data, and cut privileged empires before cutting household water.
