• Education reform

Education reform

Education is at the crossroads for the future of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It plays a crucial role in promoting poverty alleviation and economic growth, both at national and at household levels. This report traces the successes and the challenges facing the development of education in the region to identify promising education reform options for the future.

According to the report, MENA countries continue to lag behind many comparator countries, as measured by years of educational attainment in the adult population. The educational achievements to date are in part compromised by high dropout rates and relatively low scores on international tests. Despite remarkable improvements in expanding access and closing gender disparity at the primary education level, adult literacy is still low and education systems do not produce the skills needed in an increasingly competitive world. Unemployment is particularly high among graduates, and a large segment of the educated labour force is employed by governments. As a consequence, the link between education and economic growth, income distribution, and poverty reduction is weak.

The report is split in three parts. Part I makes the case for education reform by tracing past investments in education, assessing their impact on development, and reviewing the state of readiness of the education systems to meet new challenges. This assessment is comparative: education outcomes of MENA countries are weighed against those of other developing countries.

Part II examines attempts to improve education systems in 14 MENA countries, using an analytical framework developed for this report. This framework posits that effective education reform has three components:

• engineering measures,which ensure the presence and efficient use of the right technical inputs
• incentives to promote better performance and responsiveness from those providing educational services
• public accountability to make certain that education, as a public good, serves the interests of the widest range of citizens.

Part III focuses on the demand for labour (both domestic and external), and how regional labour market characteristics may be changed to maximise the rewards to investment in education to individuals and society.

The main conclusion of this report is that the education systems in the region need to follow a new path of reform, consisting of two features:

• a new approach to education reform in which the focus is placed on incentives and public accountability, along with inputs to education systems
• closing the gap between the supply of educated individuals and bothinternal and external labour demand.

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