QATAR - On my way from Doha International Airport to an hotel to attend a world education forum, my attention was riveted by a larger-than-life billboard showing the top Egyptian comedian Adel Emam with his iconic smile. He was portrayed along with other actors from around the world, invited to the latest edition of the Doha Film Festival. The following day, I was a guest at a gala honouring six people for their innovative educational projects. “This proves that Pakistan is not all about terrorism or militancy. There is also good news from Pakistan,” said Mushtaq Chhapra, a Pakistani, who was one of the six winners of the annual prizes awarded by the World Innovation Summit for Education, which is a global corroborative initiative launched last year. Chhapra is the chairman and a founding director of the Citizens Foundation, a non-profit educational organisation in Pakistan. Since it was founded in 1995, it has run a network of 660 purpose-built schools in the poorest rural areas and most underprivileged urban slums of Pakistan. The successful model presented by the enthusiastic Chhapra is based on a firm belief that education for the poor should not be poor. “Schools can be reached by walking. Pupils pay what they can afford and nearly half of the foundation's 92,000 pupils are girls,” he said. “The programme has created more than 7,000 jobs, including 4,800 positions for female faculty members, and has a volunteer force of more than 1,000. This model is applicable in other Third World countries.” The project of Nigerian Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu is innovative in its own right. He is the executive director of the Smallholders Foundation, a social development organisation, which he founded in 2003 when he was 21. Ikegwuonu has set up a rural radio station in his local community in Nigeria, broadcasting educational programmes on crop cultivation, livestock rearing and soil management ten hours a day. His pioneering radio station targets 250,000 local farmers. “Imagine for one day if the world stopped talking about politics and democracy and just concentrated on agricultural issues. The effect would be enormous,” Ikegwuonu told the Egyptian Mail. “I plan to expand the service because there are millions and millions of people for whom it could make a big difference.” His major obstacle, however, is a shortage of electricity. “Our broadcasting depends on generators, which do not allow long broadcasts.” His educational radio programmes also deal with such topics as application of fertilisers, pesticides and having access to national and international markets. The third WISE laureate is Ayla Goksel, a Turkish philanthropist working in the fields of early childhood, female literacy and parent training. Through her Mother Child Education Programme, Goksel aims at supporting and educating preschool children from under-resourced communities by training their mothers in their role as first educators through group discussions and mother-to-child learning exercises. According to her, the programme, already replicated in several European and Middle Eastern countries, now reaches over 400,000 people. To Tove R. Wang, the chief executive officer of Save the Children, it is a double injustice to deny children in conflict-afflicted areas the right to education. Wang, a Norwegian is also the Chairwoman of International Save the Children's first global campaign called Rewrite the Future, which focuses on education for children affected by armed conflict. “Out of the 69 million children not going to school in the world, two-thirds are from areas plagued by conflicts,” she told the Egyptian Mail. “These children have exactly the same right as other children in Oslo or Cairo, for example, to education. We are working to normalise their daily lives and give them hope for the future.” The fifth WISE laureate is Professor Neil Turok, who founded in 2003 the African Institute for Mathematical Science in South Africa, where he was born. Since then, the institute has been training talented students from across Africa in a partnership arrangement between Cape Town, three local universities, and the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Paris. Explaining his innovative project, Turok said it aimed at helping students study for a broad-based postgraduate diploma in mathematical sciences, which provides them with the skills, connections and confidence to go on to leadership careers in academia, industry or governance. Since 2003, the institute in South Africa has graduated 305 students from over 30 countries, 33 per cent of them women. Open education, meanwhile, underlines the project of the sixth awardee -Cecilia d'Oliveira, the executive director of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a programme for which she has been working since 2002. She leads a team of 20 professionals working closely to advance the adoption of the OCW approach worldwide. Simply put, the OCW is a large-scale, web-based publication of educational materials from virtually all courses taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In other words, the programme provides free and open access to core content -syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, reading lists and assignments. “To date, this global initiative has been visited by over 100 million individuals from more than 215 countries,” she says. “Materials have already been translated into at least ten different languages.” As I listened to these six creative people, I recalled the Chinese proverb referred to by UNESCO boss Irina Bokova at a plenary session of WISE: “If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” A moot issue As Qatar is striving to be a hub for academic excellence in the Arab world, more Western universities are showing an interest in opening branches in this tiny-but-wealthy Gulf emirate. Already six US universities have got their branches in Qatar's Education City, a flagship project of Qatar Foundation, which is a private non-profit organisation chaired by Sheikha Mozah Bint Nassser, the wife of the emirate's ruler. Located on a 14-million-square-metre site on the western edge of the Qatari capital of Doha, Education City houses a wide range of education and research facilities. Each of the Western universities located at the Education City has been carefully selected to provide world-class education, according to Qatari officials. “I think the leadership of the country wants to raise the standards of quality education in Qatar,” said Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, the Vice President of Qatar Foundation. "Our experience has turned out to be very positive. Still, I don't know if ours is the best model for other Arab countries,” he added on the sidelines of a recent conference on education innovation held in Qatar. The first of the foreign branch campuses in Qatar is Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, a US institution, which opened there in 1998. The declared mission of the Qatar branch is to provide the highest level of design education and training for the citizens of Qatar, the Arabian Gulf and beyond. The degree programmes combine contemporary approaches to design adapted to the cultures of the region. Its students have the chance to obtain a fine arts master's degree in design studies or a bachelor's degree in fashion design, graphic design, interior design and printmaking. Its newly launched fine arts master's in design studies is the first graduate programme in the Arabian Gulf. Another foreign campus in Qatar is the New York-based Weill Cornell Medical College, which opened there in 2002. It is the first American university to offer an MD degree outside of the US. The college's student body is diverse, with enrolments from more than 30 countries. One year later, Texas A & M University, also from the US, started in Qatar to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical, electrical, mechanical and oil engineering. In addition, this branch provides instruction in science, mathematics, liberal arts and the humanities. In 2004, the US Carnegie Mellon University followed, opening its first international branch campus in Qatar. Undergraduate students may choose from three of the university's programmes: computer science, business administration and information systems. One year later, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, another American institution, opened in Qatar to teach a four-year degree programme leading to a Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Service. Meanwhile, since 2008, the Qatar branch campus of the US Northwestern University has been offering programmes in journalism and communications. It plans to offer a pre-college preparatory programme. The latest to go to Qatar is HEC Paris, a French graduate school of management. HEC Paris in Qatar offers executive education programmes and carries out research activities. “In the past, our students used to go abroad and never come back after graduation,” said Al-Thani of the Qatar Foundation. “This was a big loss. This trend has been reversed now.” Professor Albert Lourde, the rector of Senghor University, a university for African development located in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, disagrees with this system. “Foreign universities in our countries can lure the best students away from the national universities,” he told the Egyptian Mail through an interpreter. “The foreign universities can even encourage students after graduation to leave their home countries to work abroad. So, this system does not work for us in the Third World,” he added. But, according to Stephanie Hartgrove, a media relations manager at Qatar Foundation, this is not the case in Qatar. “Most students prefer to stay at Qatar after graduation to start their own businesses,” she says. “Students from over 80 countries have attended the branch campuses since they started in Qatar. Generally speaking, fees charged by these universities are the same as at home. Some enrollees are granted scholarships according to certain rules.”
