Zawaya

Education and innovation alone will not solve problems of Maghreb countries

By: Salah Zeghidi

In the systematic speech he delivered in Cairo, President Obama tackled a variety of topics and issues in the scope of what he presented as a call to Arabs and Muslims… With regard to the part of his speech about development issues, Obama stressed that education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century.

The first thing to note is that presenting this recipe, education/innovation, as a solution for all Islamic countries in the 21st century – while everyone knows about the very large differences between these different countries – wouldn’t help in identifying the truth about the situations of each individual country separately or for a group of similar countries.

The realistic question that we can ask is: to what extent is this satement true for the Maghreb countries? Are the leaders of the region convinced of the importance of this issue? Do they have the political will to work in this direction, considering it the right path to provide the necessary solutions to the problem of youth unemployment?

The issue of education in the Maghreb countries occupies a prominent position among the concerns of authorities and societies alike, because education is the main route to social advancement for the popular classes, and it plays a key role in providing the various advanced economic sectors with specialist workers, technicians and managers. The problem lies in the difference of situations in this field.

Morocco is confronted with a dual issue: it faces the need to continue the development of the enrollment ratio of children that is still low (compared with Algeria and Tunisia where the same ratio exceeds 95 percent); and at the same time, it faces the issue of unemployment of university graduates, which is a common problem for all three countries…

As for Algeria, in spite of having a higher unemployment rate in comparison with Morocco and Tunisia, its financial capabilities that result from oil profits and kicking a new economic development policy, maintain the government’s role. The country also develops large programs in important social sectors such as housing, in addition to important encouragements of the private sector to urge it to invest and create jobs. All this makes observers more optimistic, or rather less pessimistic, with respect to this aspect.

As for Tunisia, observers agree that unemployment of degrees holders, which affects tens of thousands of university graduates with a high annual growth rate, will be the biggest and most serious economic and social – and may even become a political – issue in the next ten years. We can’t say that the various partial solutions that the government implemented to cope with this issue in the past three or four years can stop the actual flood of unemployment produced by Tunisian universities.

As a final word on the subject of innovation, I do not think that the economics that are dominated by traditional aspects on one side, and which are integrally linked, particularly in technology, to foreign markets, can place huge bets in the fields of scientific, technical, industrial and electronic innovation, and the region as a whole will remain fully dependent on European, American and Asian technology.