Meeting of Arab Education Ministers on Education for All, Beirut, Lebanon , 19-23 January 2003

I begin by bringing you greetings from the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, who would have liked to be here. However, I am delighted to take his place and to be back in the Arab region for UNESCO’s first major ministerial meeting of 2004. It happens that our last important ministerial meeting in 2003 was also held in the Arab region. That was the meeting, held in Cairo in late December, of the ministers of education of the E9 countries, which are the nine most populous countries of the developing world.

So I am pleased to be back so soon. It is very appropriate that we are holding this meeting in Beirut, the city of light. Beirut stands out, both in your region and in the whole world, for its commitment to education and its traditions freedom of expression and cultural diversity. Beirut is an intellectual beacon for the region.

My title for these remarks is Education for All (EFA) in the Arab world: Past Present and Future

In my intervention I shall comment particularly on the past and on the future. My colleague Abhimanyu Singh, who is the director of our EFA International Coordination Unit at UNESCO headquarters, will then focus more explicitly on the present and bring you the latest information on the progress of the great international campaign to achieve education for all the world’s people.

One of the ways in which UNESCO promotes and supports this campaign is to publish annually a Global Monitoring Report on EFA. The second report in the series, which focuses particularly on the goals of gender parity and gender equality, appeared late last year and Mr. Singh will share the highlights of the report with you.

A Little History
For my part, I want to start with a little history. We must never forget, amid all the difficulties that the Arab countries face today, that the Arab world has a long intellectual and educational tradition. It has a tradition of expending human energy and resources on the search for knowledge in all its forms. That is why, one thousand years ago, the most developed part of the world was the Arab world. The Arabs led the world in many areas of knowledge. What was the nature of their leadership and does it hold lessons for today? Let me remind you first of some interesting aspects of the Arab education system of those times and then review where the region stands today regarding education.

An important basis for the blossoming of the Arab world was the statement of the the prophet Muhammad himself when he said that: “it is the duty of every Muslim man and woman to seek education”. The prophet founded mosque schools himself and under his influence Arabs pursued knowledge for its own sake. The use of Arabic, the language of the Koran, spread with Islam and gave a common means of communication to people over a vast area.

The Arabs translated and preserved teachings from Greece, India and Persia and from these texts a mass revolution in education began during the Abbasid dynasty (750﷓1258AD) which we might compare to the campaign for EFA today. Mosque schools were open to rich and poor and to men and women alike. Although lessons on the Koran and hadith (the science of tradition) were restricted to Muslims, non﷓Muslims could attend lessons in other subjects such as jurisprudence, philology, poetry and rhetoric.

Today, to many outside the Arab world, the term madrasa (which means place of learning) evokes a narrow, even reactionary, education focused solely on the Koran. History tells a different story. As particular madrasas grew and attracted scholars from all over the Arab empire the number of disciplines grew. Teachers received good salaries and scholarships were available to students. Funds came from both government and private sources.

In view of the current status of women in much of the Arab world, we note that in those days there were no restrictions on women attending classes ﷓ and women also taught classes that included men. At that time Arab women contributed strongly to the economic, political and social life of the empire and excelled in medicine, poetry, oratory and other subjects.

In a phenomenon that was a precursor to the movement of scholars between the universities of medieval Europe, travelling from city to city in search of knowledge was a common practice in the early centuries of Islam. Academies built up impressive collections of books and knowledge was freely shared. As Arab influence spread to Spain and beyond, knowledge transfer based on Arab learning and scholarship helped to advance education in Europe, adding new disciplines to the traditional seven liberal arts, and introducing empirical methods to research.

Present weaknesses
This short reminder of history shows how ironic it is that Arabs themselves now identify a knowledge deficit as one of their major weaknesses at the beginning of the 21st century. A thousand years ago the Arabs did not simply lead in making discoveries and codifing knowledge, they also drove the development of the scientific method that became the basis of civilisation all over the world.

According to the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report 2002, which has been a wake-up call for all of us, The great weaknesses of the Arab world are the lack of freedom, the lack of knowledge and the lack of women’s empowerment. Compare this to the intellectual effervescence of this region a thousand years ago, an effervescence which drove forward the development of knowledge in a wide range of practical and more theoretical areas. Compare this to the important role that women played in this opening up and communication of knowledge.

It seems to me that the great difference between today’s campaign for education for all in the Arab region, as compared to some other parts of the world, is that here we are talking about the recovery of a great tradition that has been lost. In other parts of the world we are trying to build the habit of education from scratch.
These weaknesses have practical consequences and we are familiar with their manifestations.

First, there is poverty and its corollary of unemployment. About one in five Arabs live on less than two dollars a day and economic growth at an annual 0.5% is dismal. Unless growth can be accelerated, the current figure of 12 million unemployed could rise to 25 million by 2010.

Second, the global trend of democratisation has had little impact in the Arab region, making for frustrated populations.

Third, freedom of expression and freedom of association are very limited, exacerbating the frustrations.

Fourth, more than half the Arab women are illiterate with the result that much that goes on in contemporary life passes them by.

Fifth and related to this, women’s political and economic participation remains the lowest in the world (with only 3.5% of all seats in parliaments).

Sixth, and a symbol of this lack of engagement with the modern world, only 1.2% of the population uses a PC and 0.6% of the population uses the Internet.

Finally, telephone line access in the countries is barely one-fifth that of the developed world, which must hinder attempts by Arabs to work together.

Education for an Arab Renaissance (Nahdah)
Education for all is a fundamental means to address these deficits in society, but before looking at the status of EFA in the Arab region, let’s look more generally at the requirements of educational renewal in the Arab world in the light of the weaknesses that have been identified. Can the renewal of the Arab educational systems stimulate an Arab renaissance?

In numerical terms Arab education has made slow if steady progress in recent years, even if a good part of the expansion of school systems has been absorbed by the rapid increase in the population of children. However, the challenge is not merely, indeed not primarily, numerical. All Arab States must reflect on whether the educational systems that they are trying to expand are properly organised to achieve the objectives that they wish to achieve.

Education is first and foremost a human right and an end in itself for a civilised society. It is also, second, a means to enhance the well﷓being of society through its effects in improving health, increasing productivity and enhancing the participation of individuals in community affairs. In order to lift injustice education must have quality. Ensuring the quality of education is the major challenge facing Arab states and, indeed, many other countries. Two key components of educational quality are what is learned (content) and how well it is learned (performance).

About performance there is little controversy, which is not the same thing as saying that it is easy to achieve. Countries are increasingly eager to compare the performance and competence of their youngsters with those of other countries, one example being the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) that was originated by the OECD and is now being administered, with the help of UNESCO, to some 50 OECD and non﷓OECD countries. It measures the reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy of 15﷓year olds using tests developed by an international team. To date there has been little participation of Arab countries but the door is open.

More difficult, but also more important, is quality seen through the lens of educational content. This is attracting increasing attention from governments as they realise that school curricula and school organisation may determine whether the future of their country is peaceful and prosperous. Human capabilities must be enhanced by achieving 100 per cent completion of ten years of quality basic education. To achieve this, major international bodies such as UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank agree that basic education should be free and compulsory.

Another area for action is to create strong synergy between education and the socioeconomic system. Embedding schools in society by linking them more strongly to local communities is a feature of many successful educational reforms around the world. Education has to prepare children for the world into which they will grow up. This means that the different components of that world must be involved; parents, local authorities (such as municipalities) civil society, private sector, and government as a whole and not just the ministries of education. This will help schools adapt to the demands that society will make on the youngsters they teach.

In the Arab world society is likely to become more market oriented, which requires the strengthening of education as a vehicle for social progress. At present too many Arab school systems are neither adapted to their surrounding socio﷓economic system, nor geared to promote social equity.

Arab cooperation is also a key to development in general and the advancement of education in particular. Islam carried the Arabic language to a large region, which should now take full advantage of the asset of a common language and recover some of the pan﷓Arab spirit that helped to make the great era of Arab intellectual achievement so dynamic.

To the extent that aspects of the necessary reforms will meet resistance in some places it will be helpful for countries to work on them together. Curriculum development, textbooks and teacher training should be particularly fruitful areas for collaboration at the school level.

Planning for Education for All
Why does UNESCO place such emphasis on national planning for EFA in the Arab world?
One important reason is that this region has the highest proportion of young people in the world. Since nearly 40% of the Arabs are under 14, it is estimated that the Arab population will number 400 million in the third decade of this century.
This makes educational reform even more urgent.

Indeed, many Arab countries have embarked on reforms of their educational system and are reviewing their educational policies and strategies. I mention Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Territories.

However, despite some positive achievements, the education systems in the region remain inadequately prepared to meet the challenges to be faced in the coming years. While Arab countries spend a considerable proportion of GDP on education, it doesn’t yield quality education.

There is a stark mismatch between what schools teach and what is needed in the labour market.

Many international reports and conferences recommend that the Arab countries should emphasize education and should revamp their present educational systems and skill development institutions. There are major gaps in the quality of education, in maintaining a proper balance between secondary and tertiary education and between science, technology and other fields.

This is the framework in which the Arab region is working to achieve Education for All. I shall summarize where we have got to at present in a general manner, using the data from the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2002 and GMR 2003/2004. Mr Singh will follow up with more detail.

Where are we now?
This slide compares the major regions of the world in terms of their likelihood of achieving the three quantitative goals set in Dakar, which concern the completion of primary education, gender parity and halving adult illiteracy. Note first that of the 28 countries judged by the 2002 Report as being seriously at risk of not achieving the three quantifiable EFA goals, five countries are from the Arab States.

Second, at the other end of the scale, note that only four out of the 83 countries judged to have a high chance of achieving or having achieved all three goals are from the Arab States.

To look now at another Dakar goal, namely the expansion of early childhood education, you can see that despite great improvement in pre-primary education, early childhood care and education are still a luxury for nearly all children. Average gross enrolment ratio for the Arab region is as low as 15.8%, while the average for all developing countries is 30.9% and the world average is 46.7%. Particularly low values are found in Algeria, Djibouti, Iraq, Libya, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen where the gross enrolment ratio is less than 10 or even 5%. In countries such as Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, the figure is above 50%.
Moving on to primary level, it is good to report that enrolment at primary level grew by a healthy 17% (from 30.5 to 35.7 million) between 1990 and 2000, but the Arab region still has one of the lowest net enrolment ratios in all developing regions. About one fifth of eligible children, which means more than 7 million kids, are out-of-school: 60% of them are girls.

The Arab region, along with South and West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, has the world’s biggest gender disparities at primary level. However, once girls have access to school they do as well or better than boys. Girls repeat less than boys and survival rates to grade 5 are higher for girls than for boys. This is reflected at the secondary education level, which has expanded from a gross enrolment ratio of 49% in 1990 to almost 70% in 2000. As seen in this slide, there are more girls than boys on this level. Girls’ participation in secondary education increased during the 1990s, with strong gains in Algeria, Mauritania and Tunisia. But large disparities in favour of boys remain in Djibouti, Iraq and Morocco.

Looking now at literacy, the Arab region has some of the world’s lowest adult literacy rates, with only 60% of the region’s population of 15 and over able to read and to write in 2000, well below the world average of 80% and the developing country average of 73.6%. Gender disparity in literacy is severe. Women account for nearly two-thirds of the region’s illiterates, a figure not expected to change much by 2015. Gender gaps are particularly large in Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.

Despite the challenges that the region is facing in achieving quality education for all, there is also good news to report. Governments in the Arab region show a strong economic and political commitment to education. The international community also pays special attention to the region. Two major current international initiatives, United Nations Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI) and the Fast-Track Initiative (FTI) include countries from the region.

I conclude by saying that I am quietly confident that the Arab world will overcome the challenges facing its educational system. It is up to the Arab countries to decide what kind of education they would like to have to enable their children fully to achieve their potential in the new millennium. I see signs that countries are committing themselves to the renaissance (Nahdah), renewal and reform of education. That is essential because we cannot continue with a situation where the older youths have so little expectations for their future at home that a half of them want to emigrate to another country – usually outside the region.

Sustainable change has to be generated from within. However, I do assure you that UNESCO and its sister international organizations are ready to help with you in the vital endeavour of making educational reform and renewal a major priority for the Arab world. The international community is as eager as you are to see an Arab renaissance.