Sheikh Mohammed's $10bn knowledge economy vision, hope for a troubled region

Bold and daring initiatives are what the region has come to expect from Sheikh Mohammed whose leadership has transformed Dubai into a world-class city over the past decade.

His Highness has also not been short of education initiatives in the past. The Dubai Knowledge Village has established a regional hub for higher education, bringing in many of the world's top universities to the region for the first time. More recently he has set new targets for modernization for public education in the UAE.

'It is up to us to provide young people with happiness and hope, and to motivate them to explore the unknown, to mould them into assets,' he told the WEF. 'This is the responsibility and honour of governments and societies.'

$10bn foundation

The $10 billion Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation will be dedicated to enhancing human development and improving the knowledge infrastructure of the Arab world. It will begin with providing university scholarships.

But this is not just a matter of building educational campuses like the Dubai Knowledge Village. One GCC nation is presently bottom of a league table of global universities, and there has been much debate in local educational circles about why this is the case. The buildings are there, but perhaps the mission to learn is missing.

For great universities, colleges and schools are about more than clustering young people. They are about fostering an environment in which people want to learn and develop their skills.

Indeed, education is for far more than practical economic development, although that is still important and woefully distained by some academics. It is about personal life enhancement, opening up new opportunities to young minds and setting a positive future agenda, not one that lives in the past.

Necessary initiative

Sheikh Mohammed is therefore to be warmly congratulated for another ground breaking initiative in the Middle East which can only boost the growing international reputation of the UAE and Dubai for progressive and modern attitudes to social development.

This is surely also a beacon of hope for the millions of young people in a region that has one of the highest percentages of its population aged under 25. There is more to life than pointless internecine struggles that relive past conflicts whose original cause has been almost forgotten amid the bloodshed and achieve nothing for anybody.

It perhaps needs the dynamism and focus of the UAE to take the lead on education in the region, and that is what Sheikh Mohammed has spelled out with this vision: Get an education, and get a new life!