On 1 January 2026, the way Jordan pays for cancer treatment changed. Until then, an uninsured Jordanian who was diagnosed went through the state’s medical exemption system, case by case, and the bill landed on the treasury afterwards; by the time the new scheme was signed, cancer-care spending had reached nearly JD500 million, including about JD130 million in old debts. From that date, everyone aged 60 and above, everyone under 19 and every family on the National Aid Fund is insured for treatment at the King Hussein Cancer Center. About 4.1 million people are covered. It is the single most tangible thing Jafar Hassan’s government has done in two years, and a useful place to start, because it is also typical: a programme that was signed, funded, dated and can be checked.
Hassan was designated prime minister on 15 September 2024 and sworn in three days later, after two spells running the Office of His Majesty the King and about three and a half years as planning minister. He inherited unemployment of 21.5 percent among Jordanians in the quarter he took office, gross debt of 106.1 percent of GDP for 2024 on the IMF’s current series, which counts the electricity and water utilities, a parliament in which the Islamic Action Front had just become the largest bloc, and a war next door in Gaza. His own confidence vote, on 4 December 2024, was the weakest of the last three governments at about 60 percent of MPs.
This article looks at the social and governance side of what has happened since: hospitals and insurance, schools and skills, the public-sector reform roadmap, the Sanad platform and anti-corruption. For every programme it tries to answer three questions. What was announced? What has actually been done? And what measurable result exists? Where the answer to the third is “nothing yet”, it says so.
Priorities and Approach
Hassan’s ministerial statement of 1 December 2024 did not invent a programme. It sat inside two frameworks that were already there: the Economic Modernisation Vision, launched by King Abdullah II in June 2022, and the Public Sector Modernisation Roadmap adopted the same year. What the statement added was a schedule. An executive programme would be published within four weeks, with monthly timelines, budget lines, named institutions responsible and performance indicators the public could follow.
It also contained pledges with numbers attached, which is rarer than it should be. Eighty percent of government services online within a year and all of them by the end of 2026. More than 500 schools within five years. Two hundred new kindergarten classrooms a year. The second executive programme, for 2026 to 2029, was launched on 12 January 2026 with the King and Crown Prince in attendance; it runs to 392 projects and about JD10 billion.
The method has been as distinctive as the targets. Hassan takes the cabinet to the governorates, beginning with Karak, and agrees project lists, timelines and financing with the elected local councils on the spot. “Field work is my method and my school,” he said in January 2026, “and I will continue it until the government’s last day.” Holding cabinet meetings outside Amman, he argued, makes the government directly accountable for projects with defined timelines and financing. The Rasid parliamentary monitor counted 153 cabinet decisions in the first 100 days, a quarter of them on development and services and 22 percent on public-sector modernisation.
Two other structures matter for what follows. Hassan holds the defence portfolio, and he chairs the National Council for Future Technology, set up in early 2025 under the Crown Prince’s supervision to oversee artificial intelligence, digital health and digital identity. That is why the health, education and digital files below have moved on parallel timetables rather than as separate ministry projects.
Healthcare Achievements
Hospital and infrastructure projects
Some of what the government has opened, it inherited. The Ministry of Health’s 2023 three-year plan, drawn up under the previous cabinet, included a JD8 million expansion of Princess Iman Hospital in Maadi, funded by the Saudi Development Fund. Writing in Ammon News in August 2026, the columnist Barakat Al-Abadi credited the Hassan government with finishing and opening that expansion within seven months after years of delay. No independent completion report was available by September 2026, so the claim rests on that column and on government announcements.
The new announcements cluster in Zarqa, Jordan’s most industrial governorate. On a cabinet visit on 5 May 2026 Hassan announced a new building for Prince Faisal Hospital in Russeifa at a reported JD9 million, a comprehensive health centre on the site of the old Zarqa Government Hospital, and expanded cardiac surgery in the governorate. All three are planned items within the JD500 million, three-year Zarqa investment programme. None had been reported complete by September 2026.
One smaller programme is partly completed, and it is the kind of thing that rarely makes a headline. The Ministry of Energy has finished the first of three phases of a project to put solar water heating into 33 government hospitals: nine hospitals in the north so far, with 35,000 litres of combined hot-water storage. The whole programme costs JD3.2 million, paid through the Jordan Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Fund with Italian support, according to pv magazine in July 2026.
Expansion of services and access
The biggest single commitment to the health system in the period came from outside. In June 2026 the World Bank approved the Jordan Health Sector Reform Program, and the cabinet approved the US$400 million financing agreement behind it, the largest health operation the bank has run in Jordan. It is ongoing and results-based: the money is released against reform milestones, not buildings, so its effects will show up in service indicators over the next several years rather than at a ribbon-cutting.
A less visible reform deserves a paragraph. Under the IMF programme the government undertook to price medical services for people on fee exemptions on the same basis as services for insured patients, closing a loophole that let costs be shifted around informally. The IMF’s June 2026 report records the benchmark, due in May 2025, as missed on time and then implemented with delay.
Health insurance coverage
The cancer programme is the headline and has its own section below. Around it, the cabinet approved on 5 April 2026 an economic-empowerment policy for National Aid Fund beneficiaries, with a 2026 action plan, tying cash assistance to health and social services for the roughly 250,000 families the fund supports.
Digital health services
The Jordan Digital Health Centre is one of three platforms under the National Council for Future Technology that Hassan chairs, next to Sanad and the Siraj education assistant. It is ongoing, and independent figures on its use had not been published by September 2026.
Measurable results
Strip out the announcements and this is what can be verified as of September 2026: a national cancer insurance scheme in force since 1 January 2026, with a first instalment of JD62 million paid in February; nine hospitals running on solar hot water; a US$400 million World Bank reform programme approved; and the medical-pricing reform in place. Bed counts and patient outcomes for the period have not been published in any form that can be checked, and this article does not guess at them.
Cancer Care and Insurance
“Ra’aya” means “care”, and the programme is the health policy that belongs most clearly to this government. Hassan signed the agreement with Princess Ghida Talal, who chairs the King Hussein Cancer Foundation, in June 2025, and cover began on 1 January 2026.
It insures about 4.1 million Jordanians for cancer treatment at the King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman, the leading specialist hospital in the region. Three groups are covered: every Jordanian aged 60 and above, everyone under 19, and every National Aid Fund beneficiary without military or private insurance. The Jordan Times reported the programme at JD132.5 million when it was signed; the figures published with the first instalment are JD132.7 million in total, JD124.1 million from the government and JD8.6 million from the foundation. Hassan said at the signing that the agreement paves the way for wider coverage.
What changed is easiest to see from the patient’s side. Before January 2026, an uninsured Jordanian who got a cancer diagnosis applied for a state medical exemption, decision by decision, and the state settled the cost afterwards, which is how cancer-care spending reached nearly JD500 million with JD130 million of it in arrears. The insurance turns that case-by-case exemption into an entitlement with a fixed annual premium. As a policy it is completed; as a funded programme it is ongoing, with the first JD62 million instalment paid in February 2026.
Two groups sit outside it. Uninsured adults between 20 and 60 who are not on the National Aid Fund are not in the scheme; they are treated at public hospitals at government cost, with referral to the King Hussein Cancer Center possible, which is the route everyone used before. And anyone diagnosed before 2026 is not covered. The government has not set a date for extending it beyond Hassan’s statement that the deal paves the way for wider coverage.
Education Reform and Skills Development
School development and rehabilitation
The pledge the government will be judged on is to build more than 500 schools in five years. The two-year counts differ. Roya News tallied 120 new schools built between September 2024 and August 2026, plus 132 school-addition projects and 30 new model schools at about JD40 million; the government’s own two-year material, summarised by Petra, claims 134 school projects and 340 rehabilitations. On either count, the pace is behind.
The most visible initiative is the partnership with the private sector to build 100 schools. Hassan opened the first, Maru Secondary School for Girls in Irbid, on 3 May 2026; the Association of Banks is paying for 19 schools in the first wave. Status: ongoing. Separately, and less visibly, the government paid off the Student Support Fund’s accumulated debt to the public universities, an arrears problem it inherited, according to the same Roya review.
Institutional reform
The structural change of the two years is the merger of the Ministry of Education with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. The cabinet approved the draft Education and Human Resources Development Law on 12 January 2026, the Lower House began passing it in April with a 90-day implementation delay, and the merged ministry came into being on 11 August 2026 when Azmi Mahafzah was appointed Minister of Education and Human Resources Development. Status: completed. When parliament’s extraordinary session opened on 12 July 2026, the government also sent it bills amending the universities legislation and setting up a new accreditation and quality-assurance framework.
Digital education
Siraj, an AI education assistant, is one of the three flagship platforms under the National Council for Future Technology. Its rollout is ongoing; no independent usage figures had been published by September 2026.
Vocational and technical training
The vocational expansion is Gulf-funded. In August 2026 Hassan agreed with the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development to finance five vocational and technical schools in Amman, Mafraq, Jerash and Irbid, worth about US$40 million. Status: planned. The fund’s assistance to Jordan over the previous five years was put at around US$1 billion.
Workforce preparation
Three labour-market measures are completed. Labour-law amendments allowing flexible work went to parliament by September 2025, a step the IMF has verified. The private-sector minimum wage rose from JD260 to JD290 on 1 January 2025. And public employees are being put through artificial-intelligence training against a national target of 15,000 by 2027; the Jordan Times put the number trained at about 6,000 by mid-2026, while the government’s own two-year material claims more than 9,000. Since 1 June 2026 the recruitment of non-Jordanian workers has been suspended to steer employers toward local hiring.
Investment figures and results
The figures that can be verified are the JD40 million for 30 model schools, the 19 bank-financed schools, the US$40 million vocational programme and the 6,000 to 9,000 employees trained, depending on whose count you take. The clearest measurable outcome so far is institutional: one ministry now covers schools, universities and workforce planning, which the government says will tie curricula to the labour market. Whether that shows up as lower youth unemployment is a question for the next few years, not this one.
Modernising the Public Sector
The Public Sector Modernisation Roadmap predates this government, and much of its progress is tracked through the structural benchmarks in Jordan’s IMF programme, which the Fund checks for itself. That makes this the easiest part of the record to verify, against the IMF’s June 2026 country report.
These benchmarks fell due under Hassan’s government and were met on schedule:
- A performance-based salary-setting mechanism for all Category 1 civil servants, based on qualifications, competencies and merit (December 2024).
- An implementation roadmap to cut electricity-sector costs and support the viability of the National Electric Power Company (October 2024).
- Digitisation of 80 percent of all automatable government services (December 2025).
- A state-owned-enterprise ownership policy, published, with portfolio risk monitoring assigned to the Ministry of Finance (March 2026).
- A cabinet-approved pension-reform concept paper for the Social Security Corporation (May 2026).
The restructuring has gone beyond what the roadmap required. On 14 April 2026 the cabinet approved the regulation creating the Jordan Academy for Government Administration, replacing the Institute of Public Administration with a body meant to train senior officials. On 14 June it adopted the first phase of technical competency frameworks for government jobs in human resources, digital transformation, cybersecurity, legal affairs, procurement, media and finance. And the August 2026 reshuffle created two deputy prime ministers to run the economic-modernisation and services committees.
The administration has also been made to tighten its own belt. On 30 March 2026, with the Iran war pushing up energy costs, Hassan ordered spending controls across every ministry: official foreign travel suspended for two months, a permanent ban on non-official use of government vehicles, no hosting of delegations, smaller banquet budgets, and the heating and air-conditioning switched off in government buildings.
The 2026 Digital Media Regulation, enacted on 5 April 2026, also comes under administrative reform, though rights groups have criticised the wider media climate; that comes up under challenges. On the IMF list, one benchmark slipped: the Medium-Term Revenue Strategy due in September 2025 was adopted in November.
Digital Government and the Sanad App
Sanad was launched before this government took office. It is Jordan’s digital-identity and services app: it verifies who you are, lets you sign documents electronically and opens government services from a phone. What the Hassan government has done is make it compulsory, give it legal weight and push the number of services toward the 100 percent target.
The growth numbers come with dates. By November 2025 Jordan had activated 1.8 million digital IDs and put more than 500 services online through Sanad, with 80 percent of government services available on the platform. Users rose from 2.4 million in May 2026 to 2.88 million by the end of July, according to Biometric Update, which also reported that Jordan had reached 85.5 percent of eligible services digitised by the second quarter of 2026, from 82.5 percent in the first.
Two legal steps made it stick. In April 2026 a digital ID became mandatory for public services, and in May an amended Civil Status Law gave Sanad formal legal status. The same month the government launched remote notary services for Jordanians abroad; by then more than 500,000 documents had been processed by digital signature.
The digital push reaches into tax as well. The Income and Sales Tax Department required e-invoicing for 100 percent of sales transactions by March 2025, a benchmark the IMF records as met, and a digital licensing hub now handles clearance for the five largest control agencies, Customs and the Food and Drug Administration among them.
The target Hassan set in December 2024 is full digital government by the end of 2026. In the second quarter the gap was 14.5 percentage points. A World Bank Digital Public Infrastructure diagnostic from February 2025, which assessed Sanad’s place in Jordan’s service ecosystem, is the baseline the final stretch can be measured against.
Governance, Transparency and Anti-Corruption
The governance reform that has actually been tested is the ministerial code of conduct, which every cabinet member signed. On 28 June 2026 the government disclosed that the son of Labour Minister Khaled Bakkar had bid for government tenders and won one. Hassan suspended the tenders, invoked the code and asked for the minister’s resignation; a Royal Decree accepted it with effect from 14 July. In early July the government brought in a regulation governing ministerial conduct and preventing conflicts of interest, which turns the code from a signed promise into an enforceable rule. Status: completed. Watana’s headline, “Jafar Hassan calms a storm, but what next?”, caught the reaction: credit for speed, questions about follow-through.
Transparency work has run through the IMF programme. The Income and Sales Tax Department and Customs signed a data-sharing agreement in September 2024; every capital project in the 2025 budget had to pass through the public-investment-management process and be entered in a National Registry of Investment Projects; the three public water companies published audited 2024 accounts by September 2025; and legislation strengthening the Competition Directorate’s powers went to parliament in October 2025. The IMF records all four as met.
Accountability to parliament and civil society has been formalised in smaller ways. Hassan received the National Centre for Human Rights’ annual reports for 2024, in August 2025, and for 2025, in September 2026. On 24 May 2026 the cabinet approved a draft Local Administration Law, after consulting parliamentary blocs, former ministers and public surveys, and sent it to the House, where it now sits.
Two outside judgements bracket the record. The World Bank’s approval of a US$700 million Growth and Competitiveness Development Policy Financing on 30 June 2026 was conditional on governance and business-climate reforms, which amounts to a vote that the reform track is credible. Rasid’s parliamentary survey in October 2025, on the other hand, found 53.8 percent of MPs dissatisfied with efforts to fight corruption and strengthen transparency. The process reforms are real; confidence has not caught up with them.
How These Reforms Affect Ordinary Jordanians
A 64-year-old retiree in Irbid who is diagnosed with cancer this year is treated at the King Hussein Cancer Center under Ra’aya. There is no means test and no exemption to apply for, because everyone aged 60 and above has been covered since 1 January 2026. A year earlier she would have been going through the state’s exemption process, decision by decision.
Her granddaughter starting secondary school in Irbid may be sitting in Maru Secondary School for Girls, which opened in May 2026 and was paid for by the banks rather than the budget. A grandson at a public university is at an institution the Student Support Fund no longer owes money to.
A young man looking for work in Zarqa faces a market where the minimum wage is JD290 rather than JD260, where employers can now offer flexible contracts, and where the recruitment of foreign workers has been suspended since June 2026. Whether any of that becomes a job depends on growth the economy has not yet produced; unemployment among Jordanians was 21.0 percent in the second quarter of 2026.
And anyone renewing a document no longer has to go anywhere. With a Sanad ID, now compulsory and legally recognised, it is done on a phone, and a Jordanian working in the Gulf can get a document notarised without flying home. For the 85.5 percent of services already online, the queue is gone.
What Challenges Remain?
The government’s own targets make the clearest list. School construction is at 120 new schools in two years on Roya’s count, or 134 projects on the government’s, against a pledge of more than 500 in five, and nobody has published a progress figure for the 200 kindergarten classrooms a year. Digitisation was 85.5 percent in mid-2026 against 100 percent by year-end. AI training has reached somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 employees of the 15,000 promised for 2027, depending on the source.
Social-security reform has stalled. The draft law would have raised the retirement age to 65 for men and 60 for women and lifted contribution requirements. The House committee, which said it had consulted more than 250 bodies, rewrote about 80 percent of the articles and recommended 62 and 57 instead. The government asked for finalisation to be deferred while international labour experts reviewed it, saying there was no need to rush, and the bill was left off the agenda of the extraordinary session that opened on 12 July 2026.
The labour market is still the central unmet goal. The IMF’s June 2026 report has unemployment among Jordanians at 21.3 percent for 2025, barely different from 21.4 percent in 2024. Jordan Labor Watch said in August 2026 that about half of young Jordanians were out of work, and the same month the Bar Association warned that a 65.4 percent Tawjihi pass rate would push roughly 25,000 students into a law track that cannot absorb them.
On civic space, Human Rights Watch documented the five-year sentence given in January 2025 to activist Ayman Sandouka for a Facebook post, and the Committee to Protect Journalists reported the blocking of 12 news websites in May 2025 and called for a review of the 2023 Cybercrime Law. A Constitutional Court ruling in July 2025 ended the legal basis of the Teachers’ Syndicate. None of this is part of the reform programme, but it shapes how the programme’s governance claims land.
And the money is still mostly somebody else’s. The health and competitiveness programmes rest on US$1.1 billion of World Bank financing approved in June 2026; the vocational schools on Emirati grants. That is nothing new for Jordan, but it means the timetables are exposed to donors’ decisions, as the short US aid freeze of early 2025 showed.
Conclusion
Two years in, the social and governance record is a short list of finished, checkable reforms and a longer list of things in motion. The finished list is not trivial: cancer insurance for 4.1 million people, the two education ministries merged, performance-based pay for senior civil servants, a digital ID with legal status that everyone has to use, e-invoicing at 100 percent, a conflict-of-interest rule enforced against a sitting minister, and every IMF structural benchmark in the period met on time or close to it.
The longer list is where the ambition sits: the US$400 million health programme, the 100 schools, the last 14.5 points of digitisation, the Local Administration Law and the shelved social-security reform. None of it was this government’s idea; the Vision and the Roadmap set the direction in 2022. What the Hassan government has done is turn those directions into dated, funded and, mostly, independently verified steps.
What it has not yet done is produce outcomes people can feel. Unemployment has not moved. Schools are behind schedule. Rights groups keep recording limits on expression. Hold both halves at once: the machinery of reform is measurably working, and the results Jordanians were promised are still mostly in front of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
What has Jafar Hassan’s government achieved in healthcare?
The main achievement is the Ra’aya cancer insurance programme, in force since 1 January 2026, which covers 4.1 million Jordanians for treatment at the King Hussein Cancer Center at a government cost of about JD124 million a year. The World Bank’s Health Sector Reform Program, a US$400 million financing agreement, was approved in June 2026, nine northern hospitals have been fitted with solar water heating under a 33-hospital programme, and new facilities for Zarqa and Russeifa were announced in May 2026. Independent hospital-capacity and outcome data for the period have not been published.
What has Jafar Hassan done to improve education in Jordan?
His government merged the Ministries of Education and Higher Education into a single Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development, operational since August 2026, and launched a partnership with the private sector to build 100 schools, the first of which opened in Irbid in May 2026 with 19 financed by the banking sector. Roya News counted 120 new schools and 132 addition projects in two years, and the government cleared the Student Support Fund’s debts to universities. Progress is behind the pledge of capacity equivalent to 500 schools in five years.
What is the Sanad app and how does it support digital government?
Sanad is Jordan’s national digital identity and services platform. It lets citizens verify their identity, sign documents and reach government services from a phone. It predates the current government, which made digital ID mandatory in April 2026, gave Sanad legal status in May 2026 and launched remote notary services. By the second quarter of 2026, 85.5 percent of eligible services were online, and the platform had 2.88 million users by the end of July. The target is 100 percent by the end of 2026.
What governance reforms has Jafar Hassan introduced?
The government introduced a ministerial code of conduct and, after Labour Minister Khaled Bakkar was asked to resign in June 2026 over his son’s tender bids, a departure that took effect on 14 July, a regulation preventing ministerial conflicts of interest. It met IMF-verified benchmarks on tax data sharing, public-investment registration, audited utility accounts and competition-law enforcement, created the Jordan Academy for Government Administration in April 2026, introduced performance-based pay for senior civil servants, and drafted a new Local Administration Law now before parliament.
Has Jordan expanded cancer care and health insurance under Jafar Hassan?
Yes. The Ra’aya programme, signed in June 2025 and effective from 1 January 2026, gives every Jordanian aged 60 and above, everyone under 19, and all National Aid Fund beneficiaries without other insurance the right to cancer treatment at the King Hussein Cancer Center. The programme is worth JD132.7 million, and the first government instalment of JD62 million was paid in February 2026. Uninsured adults between 20 and 60 remain outside it and are treated at public hospitals at government cost, and people diagnosed before 2026 are not covered. Hassan has said the deal paves the way for wider coverage.
What challenges remain for Jafar Hassan’s government?
Unemployment among Jordanians was 21.3 percent in 2025 and 21.0 percent in the second quarter of 2026, essentially unchanged. School building is behind the 500-school pledge, digitisation is 14.5 points short of the end-2026 target, and AI training has reached between 6,000 and 9,000 of a 15,000 goal, depending on the source. The Social Security reform was deferred after parliamentary resistance. Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists have documented prosecutions for online speech and the blocking of 12 news websites, and major programmes depend on World Bank and Gulf financing.