As Egypt’s youth took to the streets on 25 January 2011, observers around the world were surprised by the emergence of this leaderless youth movement. During the revolt, these youth expressed their anger over high unemployment, housing costs, food security and the ‘marriage crisis’, which were all issues that the Toshka project was supposed to address. With thirty-seven percent of Egypt’s youth being under the age of fifteen, it raises the questions ‘What was the Egyptian government planning to do to accommodate the needs of the country’s large youth population’ and ‘Why didn’t the government succeed in appeasing Egypt’s youth bulge’. This paper will examine one of the largest sources of discontent, the Toshka project. The Toshka project is Egypt’s attempt to build a second Nile River Valley in the south of the country. The project was originally conceived of in 1958, during the reign of President Gamal Abdul Nasser, but was quickly abandoned. The project was restarted by President Mubarak in 1997 and became Mubarak’s signature project. The short-term goal of the project was to divert ten percent of the water from lake Nasser to irrigate 550,000 feddans of virgin farmland. The long-term goals of the Toshka project were to irrigate two million feddans, which would provide food security, jobs and housing. The government claimed that they eventually planned to relocate twenty percent of the Egyptian populace to the New Valley. The protestors that stormed Tharir Square in 2011 are from the Toshka generation. As the riots culminated, the protestors called for exactly the same services that Toshka was supposed to provide, such as employment opportunities, youth housing and stable food prices. This raises the questions ‘How did the Toshka project fail’ and ‘How did this affect the Toshka generation’. In this paper I draw on original fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2010 to address the discontent that Mubarak’s Toshka project generated among Egypt’s youth. This paper will explore both the government’s strategy for pursuing the Toshka project and the repercussions of this failed promise on Egypt’s youth.