95184 March 2015, Number 144 REGIONAL COLLABORATION ON EDUCATION: AN ARAIEQ INNOVATION Simon Thacker and Juan Manuel Moreno1 much international scrutiny, let alone cooperation. That, by the way, was also the baseline situation in Introduction: Regional collaboration on Education is other world regions which later on managed to arguably more challenging, comparatively speaking, build very ambitious education agendas (LAC and in the Arab World than in other regions of the the European Union are good examples). world. There are many reasons for this. While there is a strong sense of regional identification – indeed, the concepts of the ‘Arab world’ and even the ‘Middle East and North Africa’ are well-circumscribed and well-understood – that awareness is undercut by a lack of regional cohesion. This is in part political. The Region as a whole has faced escalating concerns over the absence of order. Ongoing conflicts, sectarianism and the politicization of Islam have all contributed to minimizing the level of Arab unity and coordination found within the Region. As a result, Though there was foreign donor support with the there has been a widening of differences both within capacity to influence public policy, there remained the Region and, moreover, between the Arab region nevertheless a low level of cooperation among the and the rest of the world on cultural and ideological regional education actors themselves, whether the levels as well as in the areas of economic and social entities were global yet regionally based (like development. UNESCO-Beirut for instance), regional (ALECSO/ISESCO), or national (such as Ministries In education, it is true the MENA region had of Educations). Commonly, each of these actors had initially made great strides after Independence in its own vision for the future and each its own improving access, equity, and completion outcomes. individual means to lead the way towards that However, as far as regional collaboration on vision. education is concerned, national policymakers largely worked to address domestic concerns alone International student assessments, such as TIMSS with only little external assistance, mostly because and PISA, undertaken in countries of the Region the Education sector was considered to be entwined starting in the late 1990s were pivotal in this respect, in national interest and identity, and so not open to as they led to a change in this prevailing attitude. Not only did they demonstrate that education 1 The authors work in the Education Global Practice quality was weak across MENA countries but also, (GEDDR) of the World Bank. This Quick Note was cleared by Harry Patrinos, Practice Manager (GEDDR). by providing in-depth analysis of assessment results, led to the realization that many countries of Strengths of this approach. The work of each of the the Region shared comparable challenges in regard ARAIEQ pillar programs has been, following this to that quality. As a result, in 2010 a call for action mandate, to find regional answers to regional was made by all MENA Ministers of Education in questions. Keeping regional policy-makers, analysts, the Doha Declaration for Education Quality. If the and practitioners in mind, it was designed to Region did indeed face similar challenges, it stood to address the need for improvements in particular reason that it should face these together collectively. aspects of education quality in a regionally-specific Much could be gained through collaboration. manner, taking into account the Regional and sub- Regional contexts. The collegium of MENA Ministers of Education demonstrated regional leadership by mandating the As an example, consider the issue of learning to read Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Scientific and write Arabic in primary school, a question Organization (ALECSO), to be the entity to address recognized to be problematic in all MENA countries. this issue. But against the backdrop of the concerns While many children learn to speak Arabic at home outlined above, it was understood that there would (in a local dialect), the Arabic they must learn to read generally need to be a push for technical cooperation and write at school (Modern Standard Arabic called from the start. And yet the reliance on a few fusa or fus’ha) differs substantially from each of these ‘experts’ – who may have no audience -- would not spoken versions. This is a prime example of what be a solution either. This was the beginning of the Arab Regional Agenda for Improving Education Quality (ARAIEQ), a network developed by the World Bank in close association with ALECSO, with the aim, as its name implies, of addressing key dimensions of education quality across the Region. What was new was the important innovative working principle of this initiative, simple yet sometimes overlooked, of being developed ‘by the Region for the Region.’ sociolinguists refers to as diglossia – the use of two Five pillars concerned with Assessment, Early distinct varieties of the same language, usually in Childhood Development, with Curriculum, different social contexts. The difference is so great Innovation and ICT, with Teachers, and with that it constitutes an impediment to their first years Entrepreneurship – all factors recognized to of learning. In response, research has been determine quality and to contribute to its undertaken under the auspices of ARAIEQ to study improvement – were developed to function in three the question with the objective of proposing ways: (i) to bring together regional specialists in a recommendations to help attenuate the challenges network or community of practice, (ii) to develop that young students face when learning to write and think-tank function, i.e., producing reports, standard, classical Arabic. The study is forthcoming. benchmarking policies, disseminating knowledge and policy tools, and (iii) hold regional workshops Innovative aspects. What has been innovative in and conferences, also engaging in training activities. this approach is that policymakers are now working Over the last three years, this has translated into a together on regional issues, and, because of this, by profusion of regional activity arising from these seeing what is happening elsewhere in the Region, programs. are in a position to ‘think outside the box’ -- something which may seem evident enough but is in fact ground-breaking. Collaboration between March 2015 · Number 144 regional policymakers is bringing about regionally ARAIEQ has not only launched a discussion about appropriate, applicable, and so useful policy the importance of education quality in the Region, solutions. An example of this is the recent Regional perhaps more significantly it has created higher Report on Education Assessment, which draws expectations about quality among regional actors. together MENA country reports on assessment of ARAIEQ is therefore beginning to be recognized for student performance systems. Its recommendations what it is, a ‘regional public good’ which should be on assessment policy and practice are specific to and sustained and developed in the Region (and of valuable across the Region. course by the Region). What remains challenging, nevertheless, is the Needless to say, though, mobilizing funds to sustain dissemination of this knowledge throughout the a regional public good of this sort is and will be Region in ways that touch all concerned challenging. ALECSO needs a very solid partnership stakeholders. ARAIEQ has succeeded in diffusing strategy and a growing leadership role in the new knowledge, allowing regional ideas to be education sector in the Region in order to address shared, appreciated, and applied regionally. and succeed at that challenge. However, if this spread of knowledge has occurred ‘horizontally’ between members of the ARAIEQ networks (for the most part at the level of policymakers and technical analysts) there still remains the need to create greater movement of this knowledge both ‘horizontally’ from the ARAIEQ network to MoEs and ‘vertically’, so this knowledge can flow more decisively to all subsidiary levels -- to school districts, schools, teachers -- where it can be put into practice and begin to have a positive impact. This challenge can be expressed in another way – in terms of communities of practice (CoPs) – and this time it is not regionally specific. What the ARAIEQ pillar programs have created in essence is communities of practice, communities of individuals coming together to share and support each other in their work, often enthusiastically. The challenge for the ARAIEQ CoPs, like all CoPs, is to know how to transfer the lessons learned to MENA states and to see them ultimately institutionalized. The post-DGF future. ARAIEQ was developed and launched with seed money from the World Bank in the form of a Development Grant Facility, a three year grant. By design, the World Bank must disengage from the initiative at the end of the grant period. In many ways, this makes sense as it reinforces the point that this was to be ‘for the Region by the Region.’ March 2015 · Number 144