UN: Arab world rife with illiteracy and lacks innovation.
U.N. report finds one third of Arabs illiterate and only $10 per person spent on scientific research.
The level of education, research and innovation in the Arab world is appalling, a new United Nations report has claimed.
The report, produced as part of a partnership between the United Nations Development Program and the United Arab Emirates-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, found that despite the efforts of scientists and researchers throughout the region, the Arab world makes up only 1.1% of global scientific publishing and the low level of investment into research has led to relatively low levels of innovation throughout the Arab world.
Examining a number of aspects of “the current Arab knowledge landscape,” the report expressed “grave concerns over the state of education in the Arab world,” with over one third of the adult population unable to read or write and major educational discrepancies between males and females.
The report found that despite 20% of national budgets in the Arab world being spent on education over the past 40 years, the average Arab individual reads very little compared to other societies and around 60 million Arabs are illiterate, two thirds of them women.
razib, murtad fitri 9:07 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink |
this only matters because arab-derived violence against the west. south asia sux way more on human development indices. there are more illiterates in south asia than there are arabs, period. 1/3 illiteracy would be teh awesome in a state of india. with the recent trends of it-all-starts-in-pakistan in regards to international terrorism, hopefully we’ll be hearing more about pakistan (even though bangladesh has crappier social indices).
johnpi 10:15 pm on October 29, 2009 Permalink |
You’ve been reading too much Huntington.
This matters to people throughout the Arab world as a pressure point of advocacy to advance their causes, from Morrocan bloggers pushing for social aid and educational subsidies to the poor, to creative professionals and telecommunications companies arguing against draconian censorship that kills competitive potential in a globalized market.
Rabiya 7:24 am on October 30, 2009 Permalink |
It matters bc an Arab foundation was part of the project, and I have this strange feeling that they probably shouldered a lot of the costs required. I’m sure there have also been studies on literacy in South America or somewhere else in the world.
Abraham 5:33 am on October 30, 2009 Permalink |
Way to set high standards.
Daddy 6:45 am on January 18, 2010 Permalink |
I have good reasons to believe the statistics were intentionally manipulated to present a worse picture than reality to try to egg on the Arabs towards gaining control of their own “destinies”.
In reality, 60 million illiterates (even if it is true) is not 1/3 of Arab world, while Jordan, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia etc have way higher and far superior social, economic and other indicators compared to a country like India, which alone houses 1/3 of the world’s illiterates.
Also it is to be noted that western hypocritical organizations are in the filthy habit of “lying through their teeth”, i.e. manipulating and falsifying data to suit their cause. It is also true that Arabs specially the ruling classes in Gulf countries have not much of a clue regarding education, which is why they believe and approve whatever nonsense western “advisors” sell them, even if that costs them pole position in global league tables for whatever indices one may think of.
UAE, Qatar, Gulf Cooperation Council, Iran, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, among other countries saw GDP based on PPP (estimates) reduced by a large percentage in updated IMF world economic outlook tables in 2008.
That is just one of many examples of Western incestuous morons manipulating data and falsifying accounts, just like before the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and killing of millions of innocent people. Hypocrite western accounts now claim less than 100,000 innocent, civilians were murdered due to this invasion.
There are problems within the Arab and wider Muslim world, one of which is indeed this lack of knowledge, the lack of vision, “intelligence” and Islamic governance.
In fact, apart from Iran and Saudi Arabia one is hard pressed to find another Muslim majority country ruled by Islamic laws.
Quite naturally, most Muslim countries are nowhere to be seen when it comes to leading the world.
If a nonmuslim does not follow Islam because he was never informed about the truth, he has less to fear and less to be blamed for than a Muslim who abandoned Islam after being exposed to the truth.
When we have most of the world’s Muslim majority countries not implementing Shariah laws, including most of the Arab world, we see that even erstwhile backward societies which still allow/practise homosexuality, incest, bestiality, prostitution, paedophilia, drunken orgies like the Western ones are seen to be admired by the nonwestern world (including most Muslims).