World Bank Says Arab Education Lagging

A new report from the World Bank on the state of education in the Arab world makes for rather depressing reading. The Middle East and North Africa [MENA] region hasn’t seen the improvements in literacy and secondary school and university attendance in the last several years that Latin America and Asia have. The problem, says the bank, is the lack of incentives and public accountability.

The report is somewhat upbeat in noting that “the MENA region has made significant strides in the education sector, having started in the 1960s and 1970s from very low levels of human capital accumulation.” In the very next sentence, though, it says, “However, it has not capitalized fully on past investments in education, let alone developed education systems capable of meeting new challenges. The education systems did not produce what the markets needed, and the markets were not sufficiently developed to absorb the educated labor force into the most efficient uses.”

This is troubling because 60% of the MENA region’s population is under 30. That means the region is going to need to produce 100 million jobs in the next 10 to 15 years, and that the educational system will need to produce workers who can do those jobs. If the region were at full employment, this would be a challenge. Instead, the World Bank says unemployment is running at 14%, the worst level outside of sub-Saharan Africa, and in the Palestinian territories, it is 26%.

The problem has been

the region on the whole has tended to focus too much on engineering [such as building schools] education and too little on incentives and public accountability. No systematic attempts have been made to link the performance of schools and teachers to student results, to put in place effective monitoring mechanisms, or to make information about school performance available to parents and students. The strategy of engaging the private sector does not discriminate by the level of instruction.

A similar point can be made with respect to public accountability. Undoubtedly, the region is becoming more open, the role of civil society is gaining ground over time, and the media is playing an increasingly important role. However, citizens, including parents and students, do not have adequate mechanisms to influence education objectives, priorities, and resource allocation.