Rania Khallaf listens in on conflicting views about the need for future studies in Egypt Last week the Higher Council for Culture (HCC) hosted a seminar to discuss and evaluate the Third World Forum (TWF) research project entitled Egypt 2020, which provides an analytical futuristic view of Egypt in the year 2020. Economist Ibrahim Saadeddin and one of the main supervisors of Egypt 2020 said that the project started in 1995, when prominent economist Ismail Sabri Abdallah, chairman of TWF invited a group of 16 scholars and researchers, including Aly El-Selmy, Hazem El-Biblawy and others, to participate in research aiming to initiate a comprehensive scientific futuristic study on Egypt's future. Participants in this preliminary meeting agreed upon the need to initiate studies to evaluate the developmental aspects in Egypt through the last 25 years, and in parallel to foresee the future of current developmental plans all through the coming 25 years. "Recognising that Egypt is a Third World country, which aims to step forward from its state to become a developing country and to continue its sustainable developmental process, the project is aware that development will not be achieved by economic and investment plans only, but by the movement of all segments of the society," Saadeddin said. "Development cannot be separated from scientific research, education or health and environment and cultural trends in the society." He added that the project Egypt 2020 includes 12 fields, representing a wide spectrum of topics including agriculture, governance, scientific research, housing, culture and media, economic transactions with foreign countries, education, social structure and social change powers, and work on the regional and the global context. "Results of each study are discussed by a selected group of scholars, so that comments on the research would be beneficial for coming studies," pointed out Ibrahim El-Essawy, professor of economics at the Institute of National Planning, Cairo, and principal investigator of the Egypt 2020 project. "In practice, intensive work began informally in September 1997. However, due to financial difficulties, project activities were suspended till March 2000. However, project leaders continued to work on a voluntary basis. As a limited amount of funding became available by mid-2003, work was resumed on two studies. However, the project is still faced with severe financial and technical problems which may impede the completion of the final report," El-Essawy added. "Future studies are a new field in Egypt. Though such studies help rediscover the country's resources and choices, and actually works as an early warning system to avoid mistakes in future, only four futuristic studies were carried out in Egypt during the last 25 years," El-Essawy said. "This in itself has been one of the big challenges facing us. Therefore, we initiated this project with an aim to participate in building our future, and with a belief that Egypt's future should not be left to uncertain and vague policies, or subject to foreign policies declared clearly by the United States at that point of time (in 1995). We have to create our own future before others plan it for us." "Our goal," he continued, "is to provide Egyptian society and its scholars with a database that offers insight into the future and functions as guidance for decision-making circles. Equally important is the need to create and encourage a public interest in futuristic plans and studies, or simply encourage the culture of futuristic studies." "Studies in each field are based on five prospected scenarios: the reference scenario, new capitalism scenario, new socialism scenario, Islamic state scenario, and a popular/ social consensus/social solidarity scenario," explained El-Essawy. The broad features of these scenarios are described in issue no. 2 of the Egypt 2020 papers series, Starting points of alternative paths to the year 2020 -- Initial conditions of the principal scenarios of project Egypt 2020, published in December 1998. To date, the project has published 22 key papers, which many academic studies in Egypt and the Arab world have referred to. The project motivated similar attempts in Jordan and Syria. Moreover, the Egypt Human Development Report for 2005 was in part based on studies by the Egypt 2020 project. However, the project has also been met with harsh criticism from some observers. "I wonder, what is the difference between this project and studies published since the 1960s by the Ministry of Planning?" said Khadiga Shehata, a researcher living in the US for the past 20 years. Abdel-Samad El-Sharqawy, member of the Arab Forum for Confronting Zionism, questioned the avail of such futuristic studies in the shadow of the government's dictatorial one-party policies. Samir Hanna Sadek, the secretary of scientific culture committee at the HCC, was also sceptical of the project's ability to predict the situation in Egypt over the next 25 years. "Future studies in the US examine the future of America in the third millennium -- not just the coming 20 years," El-Essawy disagrees. "And there is surely a link between planning and futuristic studies; any plan cannot be commenced without a future study." Fayez Murad Mina, professor of education at Ain Shams University said that financing education, opportunities for continuing learning, problems of technical education, the phenomenon of private lessons and the eradication of illiteracy are among the key issues discussed in Egypt 2020 project. Mina also criticised the existence of foreign schools in Egypt, saying that "this phenomenon is against the country's development, against creativity, and creates a cultural schizophrenia in the psyches of our children." However, he called upon education planners "to benefit from national educational plans in the US and the European Union". Raouf Hamed of the National Organisation for Monitoring and Medicine Research, said that prevailing illusory and chaotic thinking in such a conservative culture hinder the path of scientific research in Egypt. The percentage of students in university does not exceed 23 per cent of youth in the age category of 18-23 years. Government funding of scientific research is 0.63 per cent in Egypt, compared to 2.2 per cent in Israel and 2.9 per cent in Japan, he said. Professor Rasheeqa El-Reedy of the Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University, commented that Egypt's distinguished scholars should be given the opportunity to participate in the decision-making process. Hamed echoed that the main reason for Egypt's backwardness is that the government is "anxious of the power of science, scholars, and objectivity. What happens in Egypt now is an organised making of chaos. Government officials are only interested in attaining their personal gains at the expense of the future of this country." Prominent critic and professor Abdel-Moneim Teleema, whose study On Egyptian Culture was published by Meret Publishing House in collaboration with the project in 2004, said, "Society's pressure groups are the only vehicles that can regain the influential position of Egyptian culture. Egyptians, therefore, should work collaboratively towards eliminating the monopoly of the solitary political power. The administration of cultural organisations should be tackled by individuals, not by the government," Teleema concluded. The Arab Alternative Futures (AAF) study, which was sponsored by the United Nations University and carried out by the Third World Forum in Cairo led by Saadeddin during the 1980-1985 period, had, practically speaking, no actual effect on the Arab scene. This leaves us to wonder whether this new project will fare better than its foregoing study.
