Inga Vesper reports on how Europe can work with its southern neighbours to boost research and higher education.
Political turmoil since the Arab Spring of 2011 has raised expectations for higher education and research that existing institutions in the region are ill equipped to meet, attendees at the First Arab-Euro Conference on Higher Education were told.
“Our young people are looking for better research opportunities, salaries and study locations,” Sultan Abu Orabi, secretary-general of the Association of Arab Universities, told the 360 university officials from Europe, north Africa and the Middle East gathered at the conference in Barcelona. “Prospects for research are still limited in the Arab world, so we need to change that.”
The meeting heard that universities in Arab countries are experiencing a rapid loss of talent—largely to Europe—while struggling to develop stronger collaboration with each other. Several speakers cited EU initiatives, such as Horizon 2020 and the Erasmus student exchange programme, as providing models that Arab countries might follow to beef up regional collaboration.
“Horizon 2020, with its focus on excellence generation and entrepreneurship, performs those tasks that we are still ignoring,” Sumaya bint El Hassan, the princess of Jordan and president of the country’s Royal Scientific Society, told the conference. “If we continue to do that, we commit ourselves to a bleak and stagnant future.”
The Arab world has a rich history of science, yet R&D spending in the region is among the lowest in the world. The highest R&D expenditure in the region is the 1 per cent of GDP spent in Tunisia, according to the UN. But Egypt and many Middle Eastern countries spend less than 0.2 per cent of their GDP on R&D—a level lower than that of Nigeria. Recent political unrest has done nothing to change this, said Zein Karrar, the president of Sudan’s Medical Council.
Both European and Arab speakers said that closer collaboration could help to make up for low spending, while also putting pressure on local governments to support research and education more wholeheartedly. European partners could help Arab institutions to set up initiatives that mirror the European Research Area and the Bologna Process, the conference heard.
“We want to work towards a regional strategy on research and higher education, and Europe can help us raise awareness for that at the national level,” Karrar said. “One way to do that is to create centres of excellence—and this is where Europe can help as a partner.”
Arab speakers said that such initiatives and partnerships could also help their institutions gain direct support from Horizon 2020, the next European research-funding programme, which starts in 2014.
Their main fear is that the paucity of resources for research and higher education in the region is leading to a rapid and irreversible brain drain to the universities of Europe—the destination chosen by 40 per cent of Arab overseas students, according to the Association of Arab Universities.
Orabi said the association has estimated that 10,000 scientists leave the Middle East and north Africa every year. “This is more like Europeanisation of higher education, not internationalisation,” warned Seddik Afifi, who heads the board of trustees at Egypt’s Nahda University.
Michael Gaebel, the head of the higher education policy unit at the European University Association, said that addressing the brain drain is part of the EUA’s strategy for internationalisation. He said that by increasing collaboration with the Arab world it would be easier to turn the drain into “brain circulation”, with more Arab researchers returning to, and more Europeans visiting, the Middle East and north Africa.
The conference, which ran from 30 May to 1 June, was co-organised by the Association of Arab Universities and the European University Association.
In October last year the EUA pledged to support and undertake an Arab-Euro Initiative on Higher Education, which will set up working groups to study seven topics: joint degrees, employability, quality assurance, research-based learning, mobility, internationalisation, and adapting different partnership approaches for different types of institution. These issues were selected on the basis that they matter to both European and Arab universities, and are best addressed in collaboration, the EUA and the Association of Arab Universities said.
“Collaboration and internationalisation are the core deficiencies in our institutions,” said Hani Helal, a former minister of higher education in Egypt, urging attendees to use their institutions as fresh avenues for diplomacy between the two regions—as had happened, he noted, with both the European particle physics laboratory Cern and the Sesame synchrotron in Jordan.
The Arab-Euro higher education conference will take place annually, with next year’s set in an Arab location.