Mideast and North African schools are not succeeding in providing their graduates with analytical skills, problem solving abilities, critical thinking and the ability to innovate.
Forty years of government investment in education in the Middle East and North Africa has failed to deliver the skills needed for an increasingly competitive world, the World Bank argues in a report published last February.
The region lags behind Asia and Latin America in literacy and in average years of schooling above the age of 15, the report says, although investment has had some success — notably near universal access to schooling and the closure of the gender gap in primary schools. Despite a history of government spending on education at an average of five per cent of GDP, World Bank officials say the region's education systems have failed to provide their graduates with analytical skills, problem solving abilities, critical thinking and the ability to innovate.
"The relationship between education and economic growth has remained weak, and the divide between education and employment has not been bridged," says the report.
"The main problem is the region invested heavily in building schools, delivering curricula and textbooks," said Michal Rutkowski, sector director for human development in the World Bank's MENA region.
"But it did not change in the area of incentives to create a framework in which good teachers and schools are rewarded and bad teachers and schools are not."
The report ranks Jordan and Kuwait as "top performers" basedon access, efficiency and quality of education. Djibouti, Yemen, Iraq and Morocco are ranked lowest. The report argues that a lack of "accountability" has had a detrimental effect on the quality of education. It says parents, local government and the private sector have little influence over the educational process which remains largely unresponsive to the needs of society and the job market.
In a region where many countries have bloated bureaucracies and inefficient public-sector industries, the bank identifies reform of the labour-market as critical to the success of efforts to overhaul education.
It says many graduates prefer to pass up opportunities in the private sector and remain unemployed, sometimes for years, until they are offered government jobs that are guaranteed for life and boast higher benefits. The dominance of these jobs in some countries, the bank argues, creates distortions in the labour market and makes it difficult for educational establishments to know how to tailor their courses to meet the real needs of the economy.
"The education system does not have a compass to know which skills are in demand so it produces graduates by inertia," said Mr Rutkowski.
