Dubai: Education remains the biggest challenge for Arab states as they move towards knowledge-based economies, Orient Planet managing director Nidal Abu Zaki said on Tuesday.
Abu Zaki, speaking after the launch of Orient Planet’s Arab Knowledge Economy Report 2015 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, said, “We are not going to achieve high results until we make sure that the people who are really moving forward in the knowledge economy are the local communities. We are importing a lot of talent from outside.”
Abu Zaki said that although internet penetration is expected to jump from 37.5 per cent in 2014 to more than 55 per cent in 2018, when there will be an estimated 226 million users, online Arabs tend to be consumers rather than content creators or developers.
“We have achieved high figures [of usage], but we are not the source of the technology,” he said. “Take countries in emerging markets like China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, those who are achieving high growth in the private sector in terms of the knowledge economy, we found that there is a common atmosphere between development in these countries and the private sector and the education field. Government, private and education, these are the three pillars required to achieve real growth in the knowledge economy.”
Despite some scientific highlights — Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul Aziz University is ranked 6th in the world for Mathematics, for example — the Arab world was falling behind in innovation, with Saudi Arabia lodging just 294 patents in 2014 and the UAE 54, compared to the US’ 144,621.
“There is a gap between what students are studying at universities and what the market needs,” Abu Zaki said. “We in the Arab region are tending to study literature and a lot of [other] topics, but the topics we need are more computer literate people, more technical, more scientific, more research and development.
“We don’t have research and development centres, and if they exist they are basic. Among the Arab world, there are only a few.”
While there was progress since the 2014 report, Abu Zaki said developments tended to be piecemeal and lacked cohesive implementation.
“Governments are spending a lot of money to improve the educational process and move towards the knowledge economy, and putting the proper legislation. However, there is always slow implementation and lack of proper implementation. That’s what’s keeping us behind.”
GCC states, which have relatively high GDP per capita, tended to perform better than the rest of the Arab world, with the UAE topping Orient Planet’s e-performance index, an amalgamation of five indices from the World Economic Forum, the UN and other global bodies.
