_Aggregate HOIs._ In addition to the sixteen HOIs for the same number of opportunities, this paper presents three aggregate HOIs, two for children between 0 and 4 years and one for children between 9 and 15 years. The first aggregate HOI for children in the 0-4 range, is built from all seven individual opportunities included in the early childhood development, and the nutrition and hunger groups, which are computed with the DHS surveys. The second aggregate HOI for children between 0 and 4 years, is built from six opportunities in the basic housing services group which are reported in the HIECS surveys. The aggregate HOI for children between 9 and 15 years, is based on five opportunities in the basic housing services group and one education apportunity (school attendance). We assume that a child achieves the aggregate opportunity if he has access _to at least four of them_ .<sup>1617</sup> The labels for these four aggregate opportunities are respectively IOHa0-4Nutrition & ECD, IOHa0-4-Housing Services y IOHa9-15-Housing Services.

# **_2.3  Relevant Circumstances:  Household Characteristics and Location_**

The choice of the circumstances vector is limited by the availability of information from different opportunity-measuring data sets – DHS and HIECS household surveys in this case. The circumstances vector includes variables specific to the child, the demographic composition of the household, income/wealth of the household, and variables for location. The following circumstances are included in the exercise:

- Gender of child

- Number of children under age 5 in the household

- Number of children between ages 6 and 17 in the household

- Number of people over age 70 or disabled in the household

- Presence of father and mother in the household

- Education of father and mother (education of the head and his spouse in the HIECS survey)

- Household income per capita (modified to wealth per capita quintile for the DHS survey)

- Location of residence (rural/urban)

- Region of residence (Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, Metropolitan Egypt, or Frontier Governorates).

# **3. Evolution of Opportunities for Children in Egypt, 2000-2009: Time Trends and Regional Comparisons of the HOIs** **_Aggregate HOI Trends_**

_Improvements in Opportunities for Children_ . As illustrated in Table 2,<sup>18</sup> the overall HOI for children between 9 and 15 years, _IOHa9-15-Housing Services_ – the aggregate of all 5 human opportunities in housing and on education – increased from 35 points in 2000 to 72 points in 2009. This means an improvement of 37 points for the whole period, and a quite satisfactory annual rate of progress of 4.1 points per year. Similarly the aggregate HOI for housing for children between 0 and 4 years, _IOHa0-4-Housing Services_ , experienced substantial progress from 49 to 83 points during the decade. In contrast, the other aggregate HOI for children in the range 0-4 years of age, _IOHa0-4-Nutrition & ECD_ , performed very poorly and stayed at merely 14 points. In brief, the aggregate performance of access to opportunities of basic housing services is quite satisfactory for

> 16 Figure A-1 in the appendix shows the number of opportunities (maximum 6 or 7) reached by children in the age groups 0-4 years of age and 9-15 years of age.

> 17 An alternative way of building aggregate indices would be to average all 16 HOIs across the whole population. However these ”mash-up” indices suffer serious limitation (Ravallion, 2010). A solution to this critique is to build a multidimensional opportunity index for a children cohort with an appropriate threshold (minimum number of opportunities)..

> 18 School attendance was not available for 2000.

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