Arab education is failing the acid test

I spent the beginning of last week in Doha, attending the second annual Silatech summit on young people, enterprise and employment. The foundation was established last year by HH Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the wife of the Emir of Qatar, and a formidable force for social change in her own right.

"A report issued about two weeks ago by one international legal group described the human rights situation resulting from the current financial crisis as a ‘time bomb'. This description is not blown out of proportion," Sheikha Mozah told delegates as she opened the forum. "Youth of the Arab world, we rely on you to overcome our current situation and to catch up with developed countries."

The key will be to provide the right education for the right employment opportunities. Already in Syria, Yemen, Qatar and Iraq, Silatech is running pilot schemes designed to teach young locals vocational skills, and then place them with firms.

And Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told me that some current government investment in education was "misdirected". "There is a lot of training but there's not training that's getting anybody anywhere because it's not linked to job opportunities," she said. "Some of what they're doing is investing a lot of resources for not enough of an outcome."

James Wolfensohn, the subject of this week's cover interview, was equally blunt in his criticism of certain Gulf education programmes, suggesting that the top priority should be to train people for specific tasks that lie ahead.

"There's no sense having everybody do a PhD in history and philosophy in a country that is building," said the former World Bank boss. "You've got to set the aspiration levels. The top of the tree can study humanities, but the real thing to do is create an environment where those that are not so gifted can have the opportunity to do things, to build things, to create things."

This approach, if successful, should ensure that a good number of the workers tasked with building Saudi Arabia's high-speed Haramain railway, linking the two holy cities of Makkah and Madinah with Jeddah, will hail from Yemen as opposed to the subcontinent.

There are obstacles ahead, however: not least as to how all this will be funded. Silatech is a royal concern and also enjoys the support of a number of large international firms including Cisco and Pearson. But for its ambitions to be realised, the model will have to prove self-sustaining.

Right now the tentative plan is that construction firms will pay around 80 percent of the training costs of young Arab workers. And there's certainly an incentive to companies: as well as narrowing the religious and cultural divide between employer and employees, it will be cheaper and easier to relocate new workers from their home countries. Sanaa's a good deal closer than Sikkim, especially if you're building in Saudi.

The problem comes when those construction firms argue that as they have paid for a worker's training, they are owed the allegiance of that worker. They won't keep on paying if workers are able to join a competitor after just a few weeks in their new job. At the same time, the alternative is an unpleasant one, with a danger that young Arabs will find themselves in bondage to their new employers.

Silatech has the vision, the expertise and ambition to make it work. But such issues will need to be addressed before its pilot schemes can be adopted on a wider scale.

Andrew White is the editor of Arabian Business English.

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