DOHA, Qatar, May 1 (UPI) -- With oil prices climbing ever higher, it may be that those countries rich with petroleum reserves would have less incentive than before to develop an economic base that goes beyond exporting natural resources.
In the case of Qatar, its natural-gas assets in addition to its oil wealth ensure that the Gulf nation will remain cash-rich for at least several more decades to come. Yet despite that guarantee, none other than the ruling family of Qatar is insisting that the country must make full use of current wealth and invest in the future, specifically in educating its people and making them better-equipped to meet the needs of the wired global economy.
"How can we use technology fully to transcend barriers of class, race, and gender? How can technology assist in generating employment and more productive economies?" asked Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, wife of the king of Qatar, which kicked off a two-day conference in Doha on technology empowerment and education co-hosted with UNESCO.
"Often, in (the Middle East) region, the acquisition of technology is seen as an end in itself. But acquisition of technology is useless unless it is cushioned in the culture of research, innovation, and social security that is required to use the technology properly to generate knowledge-based production," the sheikha added.
Certainly, the danger of the Gulf states that are rich in oil and the money that it brings in is that there is not as big an incentive for students to study hard in order to get a prestigious high-paying job, since high salaries for Qataris is effectively a given and jobs are plentiful.
"My assistant makes more in her first year that I did after seven years in the business in London ... and that's the norm here," bemoaned one British television producer currently working in Doha.
Meanwhile, one U.S. academic teaching at a Qatari university acknowledged that her students were less motivated that their U.S. counterparts, in part due to the fact that they have less incentive to hit their books as their professional futures are more or less assured regardless of their academic performance. Indeed, while the gross domestic product growth rate of the Middle East and North Africa regions rose 5.5 percent on average between 1993 and 2003, the productivity rate only increased by 0.1 percent during the same time, according to the World Bank.
As a result, the monarch herself argued that such cultural norms and mindsets must change if Qatar is to retain its best and brightest within its own borders and for the country to wield influence on the world stage that matches its financial wealth.
There is no doubt of the queen's personal commitment to raise the education level of the country and make it more competitive in a global economy. Indeed, her personal charitable organization, the Qatar Foundation, launched an initiative a decade ago to bring prestigious foreign universities within the country's own borders.
The problem in the eyes of in the Arab world, including Qatar, however, is that the system caters only to a handful of elites that eye the United Sates in particular as the role model, while more can be done to boost the overall educational standard of the country from the primary-school level, in addition to being more focused on teaching in Arabic at higher levels. The fact that the foundation's Education City project has brought in five universities from the United States alone, namely Virginia Commonwealth, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Texas A&M and Georgetown, has disgruntled some Qataris, while the fact that the establishments combined still only have 250 students in total keep it very much a campus for the chosen few, which may well groom the country's next generation of leaders but is less likely to be a building-block for higher, overall educational standards. As for improving access to information technology and making the country more IT-savvy, greater access to technology also means more access to information, which may not necessarily be what the government, or indeed what society at large, wants.
Still, Qataris may take heart from their sovereign.
"We need confidence to be able to use technology properly, not just acquire it," the sheikha said.
