Discussion of education in the Arab world has focused only rarely on the role of schooling in changing social and political mores. This is unfortunate, because educated citizens of Arab countries tend to be much less emancipated politically and socially, on average, than their peers in other parts of the world. If Arab societies are ever to become...

In Part II of her interview, Safaa El Tayeb El-Kogali, World Bank Practice Manager for Education, explains the initiatives being take to improve all levels of public education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and how important it is for children to be able to go to school, especially when their countries are affected by conflict....

Innovation Barometer  ”"لوحة مؤشرات الإبتكار for MENA Countries:   Following-up on the last innovation scoreboard workshop held in Amman in 2015, the 12 national experts (including Palestine, Iraq and Oman) and institutional partners of the program (ISESCO, ALECSO, ESCWA, UNESCO, AIDMA) met to finalize an Innovation Scoreboard for the MENA region...

Context / Rationale Violence and radicalization in schools, especially at the high school level, is a relatively new phenomenon in Tunisia. This challenge needs to be tackled collectively and with more force in order to minimise its impacts and progressively reduce its magnitude.   The workshop intended to begin a process of capacity building of...

The Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, conducted an interview  with Dr. Dawn Chatty, an Emeritus University Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and former director of the Refugee Studies Centre in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, UK, on the sidelines of the workshop about refugees’...

Context   In light of the economic, social and environmental challenges that have become key characters to planet Earth in the early 21st century, the North and South scientific and academic communities have a specific role to play through contributing to the global knowledge advancements and promotion of relevant research to achieve the...

Research conducted on endogenous growth (Aghion and Howitt, 1992) was followed by the emergence of economies and, by extension, societies that are knowledge-based, which raised great hopes that a new model of economic and social development had been established. Various pieces of research, including by the World Bank,[1] have demonstrated...

The integrated strategic project (Figure No. 1) that the Université Virtuelle de Tunis (UVT) has been conducting over the past few years is a special project. It stemmed from an in-depth analysis of the university’s situation and addresses its needs, taking account of the obstacles to its development. The project is also tailored to its specific...

In the last two decades, the Higher Education context in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region witnessed remarkable changes in terms of increase in the number of institutions and of students’ enrollment, the establishment of regulatory bodies and measures, and the surfacing of serious challenges in terms of globalization,...

For so long, celebrating Tunisia usually went hand in hand with celebrating its youth. “Tunisian youth were rather the solution and not the problem” this was the slogan communicated throughout the Ben Ali tenure. The ousted president made youth-leveraging as his personal brand.   Over twenty years of branding and marketing to hide the ugly...

Five years after its political revolution, Tunisia’s government has acknowledged economic challenges, including a lack of foreign investment and a high unemployment rate. Many Tunisians call for a second revolution, this time for economic opportunities, including entrepreneurship and the employment it creates. Although being an entrepreneur in...

The World Bank and CMI organized the launch of the University Governance Screening (UGSC.V2.0) in the Palestinian Territories. The event convened members of the Higher Education Network, representatives from the Ministry of Higher education and local partner organizations. The UGSC.V2.0 is developed by the Higher Education Program to assess the...