Wake-up call for development
The Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society, United Nations Development Programme & Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, New York: 2003. pp210
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"The quantitative expansion of Arab education remains incomplete. High rates of illiteracy, especially among women, persist. Children continue to be denied their right to elementary education. Higher education is characterised by decreasing enrollment rates... and public expenditure on education has declined since 1985."
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Released in October by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the 2003 Arab Human Development Report, subtitled Building a Knowledge Society, follows on the heels of the widely discussed first report, published in 2002. The second in a series that will also cover Arab political freedoms and gender issues, the 2003 report examines the components for building a "knowledge society" in the Arab world, looking at the current state of Arab education, research and development, media, publishing, culture, intellectual heritage and the Arabic language and suggesting five main lines for reform.
These "five pillars" include promoting freedom of speech and good governance, improving education, encouraging scientific research and innovation, diversifying economic production and developing an "enlightened Arab knowledge model" that would be both forward-looking and open to the outside world. The report, which can be downloaded for free from the UNDP's Web site in English, French and Arabic versions, contains a mass of detailed information, some of which is unavailable elsewhere, regarding both individual Arab countries and the region as a whole. In line with UNDP practice, it is illustrated with boxes and sidebars amplifying points made in the main text, and the report contains a mass of number-crunching statistical information.
Whether read for information on specific points or countries, for an overall assessment of the state of Arab knowledge, or for suggestions for reform, the report is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Arab countries at the beginning of the new millennium. According to the foreword by Mark Malloch Brown, head of the UNDP, one million copies of the 2002 report have been downloaded thus far from the Internet, testifying to the interest the first Arab Human Development Report received. It is to be hoped that this second report, as well as the two that are to follow, will receive comparable attention.
Written by a team of scholars drawn from across the Arab world, including some who have written for this paper, the report draws on the concept of "human development", as developed by the UNDP and promoted since 1990 in its annual world Human Development Reports. Human development, this series explains, unlike economic development more narrowly conceived, seeks to measure social and economic conditions in terms other than those associated with aggregate economic performance, such as GDP figures. Instead, human development looks at a collection of measurements together, including ones related to education, access to information, and "quality of life". From these it produces a "human development index" (HDI) value, which allows countries to be compared and ranked.
The 2002 first Arab Human Development Report concluded that in respect of many of these key human development indicators the Arab countries were in danger of falling behind comparably situated countries. The second 2003 report examines the state of play regarding knowledge in particular, concluding that while there are many reasons to feel confident about the Arab countries' performance, it seems that taken as a whole they are in danger of falling behind comparably situated countries in education, research and development and other knowledge- related fields. This can be expected not only to harm their future economic prospects, but also their human development, understood as the skills, capabilities and opportunities open to their citizens.
One of the topics treated at length in the report, and one that is clearly central to efforts at building a knowledge society, is education. According to the report, "the quantitative expansion of Arab education remains incomplete. High rates of illiteracy, especially among women, persist. Children continue to be denied their right to elementary education. Higher education is characterised by decreasing enrollment rates... and public expenditure on education has declined since 1985." Furthermore, the quality of education provided in Arab countries is poor, the report says. Teachers are poorly paid, and "the curricula taught in Arab countries seem to encourage submission, obedience, subordination and compliance, rather than free critical thinking."
Illiteracy rates, enrollment figures and public expenditure on education can all be checked by consulting the tables at the end of the report, compiled from UNESCO figures. These reveal that according to such broad-brush indicators while there are Arab countries that are performing badly, there are others that are performing better than, or as well as, the cited comparator countries. Palestine, for example, has better primary education figures than South Korea or China, as does Tunisia. Almost all Arab countries spend more on education, as a percentage of GNI, than do the comparator countries given, sometimes three times as much. There are higher percentages of women in higher education in most Arab countries than there are in the comparator countries of South Korea and Israel. Pupil-teacher ratios for primary and secondary education in Arab countries are in general comparable to or better than those in the comparator countries.
Far more difficult to assess, however, is the quality of the education given, and here the report notes the "insufficient information and data" available and "the complete absence of any standardized measurements". Yet, the studies that are available suggest that Arab students are currently not properly benefiting from the education they receive. Thus, Kuwait, for example, which "spends generously on education and has made outstanding progress in its quantitative expansion", nevertheless came bottom in a 1995 international mathematics and science survey, its students performing dismally when compared with the top- ranked country, Singapore. In Egypt, a survey of elementary students' mastery of basic reading, writing and mathematics, showed that less than half of students had mastered reading and writing skills, and less than a third mathematics.
Such outcomes are worrying both in themselves and because they do not reflect the often high educational inputs in place in some Arab countries, such as Kuwait, and the respectable intermediate indicators, such as class size. Regarding education, one of the report's five pillars, the authors recommend that reforms should be pursued aiming at enhancing the creativity, independence and versatility of Arab students, abandoning traditional curricula and teaching styles that encourage passivity and rote-learning and instead promoting the "skills and capabilities demanded by a competitive and constantly changing employment market."
A further section of the report that has received much discussion is that concerning culture. Already, in the education section of the report, the authors had suggested that reforming education also meant focussing on the cultivation of talents in the earliest stages of life, which meant "parental education...and [the provision of] fresh and stimulating educational materials for infants and young children inside the family". This implies that educational reform cannot simply be a matter of shaking up institutions, delivery mechanisms and forms of assessment: cultural factors are also involved that have to do with the experience of children within the family unit, and the last of the report's five recommendations similarly targets some kind of cultural reform.
Here, the report says that human development, required if the Arab world is not to "remain in a marginal position in the next phase of human history... as passive consumers of other countries' proprietary knowledge, technology and services," is currently being impeded by "the political exploitation of religion", which penalises original thought and encourages irrationality and superstition. The analysis offered here seems to indicate that modernisation has been incomplete in parts of the Arab world, with the result that "a sub-culture that encourages superstition has remained to the present day and will certainly thrive in popular environments." The answer, the report suggests, lies in proclaiming "positive religious texts that cope with present realities and the hoped-for future", renovating the Arabic language, and encouraging interaction with other cultures, including through increasing the number and quality of translations. Internet access should be promoted, publishing overhauled, and censorship and other controls removed from the press and media. Only in this way, the authors state, can the new challenges of globalisation be met.
"The only historical possibility for Arab culture," they write, "is to go through this new global experience. For it cannot exile itself, feeding only on its past, its history and its intellectual heritage in the new world of overwhelming powers that dominate knowledge, products, technology and global culture. There is nothing that can justify Arab culture, in light of its rich historical experience and heritage, seeking to escape from the new conditions ... Withdrawal, even if it were feasible, would only lead to the weakening, decline, and fading away of the structures of Arab culture, rather than their flowering and further development."
In another section of the report, the authors have much of interest to say regarding scientific research and development in the Arab world, the condition of Arab research institutions, libraries and laboratories, and the need for all of these to be improved if science and technology is to be "indigenised" and the current hemorrhaging of talented people stopped. At present, the authors state, Arab countries contribute a negligible amount to world research and development, and the building of Arab "knowledge capital" has too often been impeded both by poor quality education, or low educational attainment, and by an intellectual climate vitiated by censorship and other forms of control.
Historically, investment in foreign technology has often led only to temporary gains in production capacity, which is then swiftly lost as that technology becomes obsolete and the products and services generated uncompetitive. Under these conditions, the authors note, the only answer is for Arab countries themselves to produce new technologies, which implies a powerful effort in the direction of improving education, research and investment. At present, the Arab world is "stuck at the wrong end of the technology ladder, a situation which drastically reduces Arab investment returns".
The links between the five pillars of the knowledge society recommended in the report's conclusions, already commented upon in those between education and culture, are also made explicit here. "Competitiveness and the encouragement of a critical mass of creative entrepreneurs ready to accept risks in seeking new areas of technology generation", the authors note, are for the moment "not common feature[s] of Arab economies". However, they are essential if the present poor state of research and technology in Arab countries is to be improved, and they call for "changes throughout the entire fabric of society, from systems of upbringing and societal values to the public policy environment and the supporting educational infrastructure, including educational and financial institutions".
Finally, the report, sometimes almost indigestible in the great mass of information it contains, aims to serve as a powerful wake-up call for the region as a whole. It also encourages comparisons to be made between Arab countries and other similarly placed states and regions. Inspection of the UNDP's own figures (2002), for example, shows that three Arab states, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar rank among countries enjoying high human development, having HDI values of 0.813, 0.812 and 0.803, respectively, as compared to 0.882 and 0.849 for South Korea and the Czech Republic, also in the high human development group.
However, while three Arab countries appear in the high human development group, four have low human development (Sudan, Yemen, Mauritania and Djibouti) and the rest medium human development. Egypt comes 115th in the UNDP's 2002 HDI ranking, below countries such as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, which have recently emerged from the former Soviet Union and have lower per capita GDP figures than Egypt but far higher literacy rates and educational enrollment figures.
If the analysis offered in the 2003 Arab Human Development Report is to be believed, it is through improving literacy, educational attainment, political freedoms and cultural openness that higher human development, as well as economic growth and GDP, is to be achieved.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
