At special presentation of Middle East-North Africa report in Sana’a,World Bank says education in Yemen is nearly the worst in the region [Archives:2008/1156/Local News]
Sarah Wolff
SANA'A, May 18 ) The World Bank recently held a meeting for Yemeni civil society stakeholders at Sana'a University's Public Information Center to announce the findings from its most recent report, “The Road Not Traveled,” which addresses changing problems in the education sector throughout the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region.
Yemen is one of the three lowest performers when it comes to regional education. Currently, Yemen's overall educational profile is perilously close to being the worst, with only Djibouti coming in behind regarding access, equity, efficiency and quality.
Yemen still faces problems with illiteracy and getting children to complete even elementary education, something that was a non-issue in the majority of the region.
Additionally, its low level of public accountability – because the majority of standards and educational expectations are dictated by the state instead of by citizens – made Yemen the absolute lowest scorer when it came to educational outcomes and political accountability.
The region in general is struggling to accommodate its huge youth population and enforces rote learning instead of creative problem solving. The report stressed problem solving as a major factor in bettering education by division: elementary, secondary and tertiary (at the college level).
However, the report stated that there's still hope for Yemen's education sector. The highest per capita income earning countries, Saudi Arabia and Algeria, still came in second in terms of education to lower per capita income earning countries like Jordan and Tunisia. This means that even countries that aren't rich still can perform well when it comes to education.
The WB report originally was presented in Jordan, the MENA region's consistently highest educational performer, on Feb. 4 in Amman.
“Education is central for the future of the MENA region,” noted Dr. Marwan Muasher, the World Bank Group's senior vice president of external affairs, at the meeting in Amman, “It plays a crucial role in promoting poverty alleviation and economic growth, both at the national and household levels.”
The report urged all countries in the region, but especially low-performers like Yemen, to become accountable to the public and not remain accountable to the state.
It also identified watchdog and advocacy groups as a necessity for all such countries, exhorting Yemen in particular to strengthen its accuracy, access and transparency regarding information and statistics as simple as student outcomes, attendance, dropout rates and teacher absenteeism because there isn't enough reliable data in Yemen to even make clear statistical studies on these topics.
The World Bank has donated $787 million in development aid to Yemen. A recent meeting in Sana'a between journalists and several World Bank executive directors revealed that assistance to Yemen has been increasing over the past two years due to its status as a focus area for the bank.
However, Yemen did spend some time out in the cold after corruption and opacity crippled its access to outside development funds, including those from the World Bank. Aid donors shied away from giving money to a government that pocketed more than it gave to the needy, so financial assistance dried up.
Eli Whitney Deveboise, WB director in the United States, said at the May 13 meeting in Sana'a that there are currently 19 World Bank projects in action in Yemen, pointing out that the bank's highest board has adopted strict anti-corruption enforcements to ensure that loans and aid are distributed as they should be.
However, the executive directors all maintained that distributing the funds is the Yemeni government's responsibility and that the WB only looks at loans and aid from a policy angle.
The World Bank is running a long-term program in Yemen called the Basic Education Development Project, which began in 2004 and will continue until June 2010. The project's goal is to establish quality basic education in grades one through nine for children of both genders by building new schools, creating more educational access for the rural population, better school curriculums and strengthening the Education Ministry's capabilities.
The project has a special focus on female education, since according to studies by the United Nations and the WB, Yemen is one of the most gender-unequal countries in the world. Only 35 percent of Yemeni women over age 15 are literate, while a mere 5 percent of women in the entire nation stay in school long enough to attain a university level education.
Although Yemen currently is on track to meet the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goal of universal elementary education by 2015, there are still 906,000 primary school-aged children not in school, two-thirds of whom are girls.
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