In Pursuit of A Better, More Equitably Distributed Tomorrow for MENA

Changemakers across the region are using education to create a better future for MENA's inhabitants

Like many Arab youth who excel in high school, Hossam Taher was presented with the three infamous options for the academically inclined in our region: engineering, medicine, or law. 

Hossam embarked on his path to be a doctor and was on his way to being a successful general practitioner when he suddenly realized he wanted a different path. Medicine was a noble and important path, and he was good at it - but he felt it might be limiting. It didn’t create the daily societal impact he craved. 

Like many of the changemakers I interviewed through the Taalimna podcast series, Hossam found his calling in education entrepreneurship.  Hossam and others I spoke with kept returning to education entrepreneurship as a way to create a better MENA region, a better tomorrow for everybody, starting from today. 

We launched the podcast series to try to better understand the emerging landscape of MENA Edtech and to ask key stakeholders the questions that mattered. The answer to “why are you doing this” invariably came back as the pursuit for a better, more equally distributed, tomorrow for the people of the region. 

Seif Abou Zeid has been trying to create a better Egypt and MENA since 2011 when he launched Tahrir Academy - a regional adaptation of Khan Academy which had been launched years earlier. Seif launched Tahrir (Arabic for liberation) as a non-profit effort with volunteers from the Egyptian diaspora across the globe. 

Despite high engagement from hundreds of thousands of learners, Tahrir needed to shutter after failing to raise funds. The enthusiasm of it’s founders, and the early support from benefactors was not enough. He stresses “the difficulty of creating scalable and sustainable change using a non-profit model - especially in our region”. 

The travails of running a non-profit education model have become even more apparent in the wake of the pandemic as investor money pours into for-profit ventures. Philanthropic capital appears to be ironically less patient, less deep, and less accessible (at least in the MENA region). This trend is perhaps most clearly evidenced on a global scale by 2U’s recent acquisition of edX which was at least partly driven by the non-profit’s inability to keep up with for-profit competitors and their access to deeper pockets. 

One of these for-profit companies that has been scaling impressively across the region is Udacity. Udacity’s MENA expansion has been partly spearheaded by Ayah Shashaa who has led their work with governments first across the region and now across the world. Whereas most western companies export their products and business models to the region, “Udacity for Government” is a product first prototyped in MENA and that is now being offered across the world from Chile to the state of Ohio. 

Udacity for Government has been particularly successful in Egypt where the company is working with the authorities to train thousands of Egyptian engineers to become freelancers in the global gig economy. Notably, the company’s agreement with the government measures their impact in terms of the hundreds of millions of dollars it hopes to add to Egyptian GDP over the years (eventually over $400M by the end of the partnership - making Egypt one of the top 5 countries in the income generated from the freelancing).

Technology alone cannot solve the region’s biggest educational challenges. One of the largest, if not the largest problem, afflicting the wider region is that of low levels of Arabic literacy. 

Before being an architect and designer, Lujain Abulfaraj is a mother of two. Like many other parents raising children in an Arab world dominated by English, Lujain struggled to get her children to speak and engage in Arabic - to fall in love with the language like she has. 

“It really struck me when my son’s nursery called me to say he was refusing to attend Arabic class,” Lujain explains; “I had to do something about it.” Lujain wanted to make sure that Arabic was as accessible and engaging to children as the English language. She noted the discrepancy between the plethora of well-designed games and resources focused on the English language - and a lack thereof in Arabic. She took matters into her own hands and recently launched Takween: “a set of modular magnetic blocks that form Arabic letters through play”.

The region is afflicted with a myriad of educational challenges that will require a collective and concentrated multidisciplinary effort. As Seif notes, “systemic and long-term change must be gradual and start with the grassroots” and as Lujain reminds us we can all play our part by for starters: “not ridiculing children [or adults] when they try to speak Arabic”.

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You can listen to all the episodes of Taalimna (in Arabic) by going to Sowt.com’s dedicated page here. You can read the recap of the first half of the mini-series here.