Yemen Observer: http://www.yobserver.com
Posted in:
Business & Economy
Written By: Faisal Darem
Article Date: May 17, 2008 - 6:07:20 AM
Education in Yemen has reached a roadblock and cannot get progresses and serve development because of the superfluous amount of ministries dealing with education.
“There are three ministries of education all trying to govern education in Yemen and every ministry has special strategy and mechanism, so we have to work on unifying educations strategies to one in order to get benefits,” said Dr. Abdusalam al-Joufi, Minister of Education, during the launch of the Education Flagship report - The Road Not Traveled, issued by World Bank on Thursday May 8, 2008.
“By 2015, we are in need around $16 billion to public education, so nobody can separate economy and education,” al-Joufi said. However, the money that al-Joufi is calling for equals the value of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from now until 2015. This huge financial gap is forming the largest obstacle toward education. Education indicators in Yemen made by the World Bank report relied on indicators and statistics. They do not talk about the current reality, but took their statistics and indicators from of 90s, according to al-Joufi.
Al-Joufi also said that “the report analyzes the reality of the educational process during the past. To get better results, the authors of the report must refer to the educational indicators issued by the Ministry every year.”
“The authors of the report have to see on the latest report issued in this regard, the report issued recently by UNESCO on education in the Arab world,” al-Joufi said. It said that Yemen has achieved high results in increased enrollment, especially females, and increased financial allocations within the state budget for education sector. It also showed the challenges facing Yemen in this area, including the high population growth, lack of financial resources and population dispersal, according to the report.
Al-Joufi reviewed the achievements made by the Ministry and of reducing the gap between male and female enrollment, rehabilitation and training thousands of teachers, as well as strengthening the human capacity in building of educational leadership, thousands of classrooms and hundreds of schools.
For his part, Mourad Ezzine, Sector Manager of the WB in Washington DC, said that MENA (Middle East and North Africa) governments have invested heavily in education and Yemen expensed around 32 percent of government budget to improve education system during 2000-2004.
Ezzine also said that the increase the public expenditure of MENA governments to education is a powerful force that contributes to the economic growth and improvement of quality of life for citizens. The stock of human capital has increased as measured by adult literacy rates and the average years of education in the population.
Investment in education was associated with lower fertility and mortality rates and longer life expectancy, he said.
Ezzine said that from a comparative analysis of 14 MENA countries, we find a wide variation in reform outcomes. in attempt to explain the variation in outcomes to three factors: successful reforms have better engineering and more aligned incentive, the better performers engage the private sector in providing education to a larger extent, especially at higher levels of education, countries with higher public accountability produced better education outcomes, Ezzine said.
Not only education system, but also reforms in labor market and migration policies are indispensable to bring successful economic development. Market labors need skilled labor, either nationally or regionally.
Mutahhar al-Abbasi, Deputy Minister of Development and International Cooperation said, “I am wondering if there is relationship between investment in education with economic growth and labor market. Unfortunately, there are no relations.”
He also added that the “education system can contribute to redelivered wealth and improves individual’s income. Human resource is the cornerstone of development. It forms an inexhaustible resource vice versa oil or another resource. For instance, Japan get improvement due to it paid attention to education of human resource. Thus, education must focus on serving development through facing labor markets needs locally or regionally.
Mohammed Mutahhar, Deputy Minister of Higher Education said that we suffered from shortages of financing of higher education, there is no coordination between concerned ministries in terms of higher education especially, Ministries of Finance, planning and civil service.
Mutahhar said that we are preparing draft law of higher education which would form board for every university. The main mission of this board is accountability the chairman of university and other officials.
The panel also asked the government to adopt accountability in education system.
Participants called for adopting one strategy for education to gather more financial support and improve education quality.