As Mashreq celebrates its 50th anniversary, its energetic CEO, Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, marks a full life in both the private sector and in public life. The successful banker and businessman talks of his pride in his time as Speaker of the Federal National Council, and how he is focusing his philanthropy on the vital topic of improving education in the UAE.
Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair speaks with Gulf News
“Our education system has failed. This is the truth. The bulk of UAE high school graduates have go through a foundation year in university or college. That means we have to spend one more year upskilling students to be fit to go into universities. This is not acceptable.”
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With these stark words in an exclusive interview to Gulf News, one of the UAE’s leading bankers and businessmen sums up the crisis facing the country as its business community wakes up to the challenge of finding effective recruits from an educational system that does not deliver some of the essentials that any country with an ambitious future must have.
Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair is the CEO of Mashreq, the UAE’s leading privately owned bank which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this month. He is confident that the UAE can ride out any cyclical economic downturns, even if people have “to get used to single digit profits rather than expecting double digits” but he is very worried that the next generation of Emiratis need better skills than they are being offered today.
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“I am concerned about the state of education in the UAE. For the country’s size, its growing economy, and its political role, our education should be much better. And the government has realised this and have made it into a priority. We have no choice but to fix the education system from kindergarten to university.
“We need quality students coming out of high school. We need zero dropouts from kindergarten to high school. It we have any dropouts we need to know why that happened, and we should first stop that. Then we need to first address the quality of teaching and experience of learning at our school and then we can go on and look at our universities.
“These are our challenges and this is why we need to be in the situation where all our students graduate from high school and every university will fight to admit them without a foundation year.
Al Ghurair is well aware that educational reform cannot stop in the schools, and points out that the UAE “needs Masters degrees and PhD degrees here as well. We are not going to survive on just undergraduates. We need to have research-based universities which produce quality thinkers.
Private schools
He is even ready to recommend some kind of voucher system under which the state could pay the fees in private schools for those Emiratis that cannot afford them, but also recommends that within the state system the headmaster and parental communities be given more authority so they can improve their own schools.
“Emirati students should have a choice between private and public schooling. Over time the model for the education for UAE nationals will have to change, and we have to tell the parents of the students to take their child anywhere and we will pay the fees directly to your high school, and we will stop spending on our schools if they cannot deliver.
“But our state schools must produce good quality students. Within the public system we need to allow a bit more independence in running the individual schools in order to enhance their quality. Some state schools are better than others because they have a parents’ council, they have a good principal to direct the school to do a better job. We should give back that authority to the schools to run themselves”.
Philanthropy
Al Ghurair’s family has played a significant part in supporting education in the UAE for decades, and the new programmes being managed under the Al Ghurair Foundation continue that tradition. Even before the UAE was established, Abdul Aziz’s father, Abdullah Al Ghurair built a school in Masafi in the 1960s because he had a farm there and wanted to do something for the community.
“This was the first rural school in the country, and the first co-ed school in the country, and people accepted sending their daughters and sons to a co-ed school because there was only one school in Masafi. Some of the leaders we see today in the UAE, are graduates of Masafi School.
“My father did not talk about it, and I myself did not know till recently, but he built four schools, which he handed over to the government to be state schools. He built the infrastructure and facilities and then the government took over. The one in Rashidiya is still ranked in the top five state schools in Dubai by quality of outcome, and is a model school for Dubai,” Al Ghurair said.
Gems under the sand
This tradition has carried forward to the new programmes that the Al Ghurair Foundation has started in supporting low-income UAE and Arab students through university.
“We are working to give high quality university opportunities to high achiever UAE nationals and Arabs. We have also recognised the trauma that some of our Arab countries are going through so we gave higher score if you were a refugee. One of our applicants from a refugee camp made it to McGill. There are gems under the sand,” said Al Ghurair.
Last year, the foundation received more than 35,000 scholarship applications for the Al Ghurair STEM Scholars program from UAE nationals and other Arab nationals across the Arab world.
In its first year only, the foundation celebrated giving about 440 scholarships for students to go to leading universities in the UAE like the American University of Sharjah (AUS), and in the region like the American University of Beirut (AUB) and American University in Cairo (AUC), as well as universities in the US and Canada including McGill and Arizona State University. The foundation only gives scholarships in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, as they are the most critical subjects for the UAE and global job markets.
The second strand of the foundation’s activities is to create more awareness of the benefits of studying over the internet.
“Many countries are going through a big debate on how to regulate open learning. We have been in discussion with the UAE education authorities and we have collaborated with MIT to start pushing the envelope on open learning,” Al Ghurair said.
“We have supported students to do a MicroMasters at MIT on a programme that has them complete half a master’s degree online, and if they succeed they can then apply to complete the second half on campus in Boston. The first half, or the MicroMasters certificate, can be earned in a subject such as supply chain management or development economics, and it is increasingly recognized by employers. If the students complete the certificate, we will offer the top students scholarships to go to Boston to complete their master’s degrees.”
Al Ghurair has been working with the UAE Ministry of Education to look at how to manage open learning.
“The government has a unit to allow accrediting of degrees, including those that are offered online by quality universities. This is important as it is no use to anyone to have a degree that is not accredited,” he said.
The third strand is to upskill UAE nationals going through the high school system so that they are properly ready for college when they leave school.
“We want to eliminate the need for the foundation year at universities and colleges. We are exploring how to work with high school students, and how we can find the time during the afternoon or weekends, and use these out-of-hours to upskill the student and make them ready for university.
“We are working with the Ministry of Education so that it can endorse our program and also we need to find the right model that works for the ministry, the students and us to build a cost effective programme,” Al Ghurair said.
