March 11, 2008 - Education is at the crossroads for the future of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A recent World Bank report on education places Egypt among the group of average performers with Tunisia, Lebanon, Iran, West Bank and Gaza, and Algeria.

The report ‘The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa’ finds the middle performers group tends to closely track the top-performing countries (Kuwait and Jordan). The least performers group include: Djibouti, Yemen, Iraq, and Morocco.

The middle performers seem to have their own specific mix of education achievements and challenges, the report finds. As for Egypt, the country has reached universal primary education and reduced the gender gap at all levels of instruction, literacy levels remain relatively low and the quality of education could be improved.

The report argues that countries in the Middle East and North Africa need to overhaul their education systems to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive world and realize the potential of their large and growing youth population.

After 40 years of education investments that have closed the gender gap at the primary school level and resulted in nearly universal education, the region faces new challenges posed by globalization and the “increasing importance of knowledge in the development process,” says the report.

Up until now, MENA countries focused on building schools, recruiting and training teachers, and enrolling ever greater numbers of boys and girls in primary school.  Special efforts were made to include girls, rural children, children of particular ethnic groups, and the disabled, says the report. But the region still lags behind East Asia and Latin America in literacy and in average years of schooling among people 15 and older.

Policy-makers should use incentives, public accountability, curriculum, and labor market reforms to make the region’s economies more dynamic. According to the report, successful education reforms require better engineering of education, better motivation/incentives, and improved public accountability. These three building blocks arguably add up to successful education reforms.

Some findings related to Egypt:
While the MENA region as a whole may have focused too much on the engineering of education and too little on incentives and public accountability, this observation does not apply equally to all countries. MENA countries vary among themselves in the reform approach they followed, as well as in the education outcomes they have been able to achieve.

• As for reforms, Egypt has also been active in implementing pedagogical reforms. Egypt has embarked on a grand mission to redesign the curriculum so that the learning objectives revolve around competencies and skills that promote problem solving and lifelong learning. In addition, the use of IT is a large agenda both in teacher training and usage as a pedagogical tool in classrooms. Revision and further development of curriculum is also an important intervention. A common curriculum in selected core subjects for both technical and general schools was implemented in addition to new electives to promote flexibility in school curriculum and to foster student-centered learning.
• Primary education enrollment, Egypt among other countries has net enrollment rate (NER) above 90 percent.
• As for secondary education, gross enrollment rates for Egypt are 85 percent or more.
• Finally, with respect to higher education, Lebanon was the first country to attain enrollment rates over 15 percent (in 1970), followed by the Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria (in 1980). By 1990, Jordan and Kuwait had surpassed this benchmark.