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Rabat – Across countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 59 percent of children are in learning poverty — they cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text by age 10, according to the World Bank.
The release of a World Bank report exploring learning poverty in the MENA region on June 29 which aims to make those responsible for education decision-making more aware of the ways Arabic teaching and learning can be improved.
The World Bank also live-streamed a launch event on the 29th, hosted by the Queen Rania Foundation, featuring policymakers from across the MENA region. The event focused on the themes central to the report and highlighted the voices of students in the region.
Ultimately, the World Bank has composed findings on learning poverty, driven by the wider principle that a lack of engagement between children and their education system withholds countries from fulfilling their socioeconomic potential.
The report outlines the ways in which the teaching and learning of the Arabic language can be made more effective as a means to combat this deficit of effective learning in the region. There is a wealth of general guidance, supported by scientific research, that can be used by education professionals to advance teaching of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
While children across the MENA region have ample access to dialects of Arabic taught at home, it seems that MSA, the language of education, literature, and mass media, is harder for many children to pick up. This poses significant challenges for many children learning to read and write in the region. This problem is unimaginably far-reaching considering Arabic is spoken by over 467 million people across 60 countries worldwide, each with their own distinct dialects.
“These challenges can be addressed by purposeful actions such as having a language-rich environment, early exposure to MSA, and high-quality instruction that is based on the science of learning to read and that maximizes the overlap (which is sometimes high) between MSA and colloquial varieties” reads the report.
The World Bank delves into the teaching and learning practices that can be adopted across the region to advance Arabic instruction, and ultimately reduce the dire problem of learning poverty.
Learning poverty is a term coined by The World Bank in 2019, accompanied by a popular twitter tag #LearningPoverty to drive the dissemination of statistics and information on the topic.
One strategy proposed by the report is promoting children to read in their mother-tongue and supporting oral language development through conversations with parents. Morocco is used as an example of the setbacks facing children in the MENA region. The World Bank reports that in Morocco, 21 percent of parents reported that they do not talk about their preschool-aged child’s activities with them (compared to the international average of 4 percent), 35 percent never or almost never talked with their preschool children about what they had read (compared to 12 percent internationally), and 51 percent never or almost never played word games with them (compared to 16 percent internationally).
The report shows that Learning Poverty rates are extraordinarily high in Morocco, with 66% of children not reaching proficiency by late primary school age, as compared to 63% in the MENA region as a whole.
The quality of Moroccan schooling also came under scrutiny in the report, revealing that only 9% of children in the country were in a school with a well-stocked library in 2016. Furthermore, a 2019 study showed that only 42% of Moroccan grade 4 teachers have a bachelor’s degree or higher, countering targets in the MENA region that all teachers should be sufficiently qualified to teach reading and writing effectively.
It seems that Morocco’s Ministry of Education is one step ahead of this well-evidenced critique by the World Bank: Saaid Amzazi, Minister of Education released a draft of a revamped primary school curriculum in August 2020. This reform to the early schooling of Moroccan children was highlighted in the report, which also analyzes other Arab learning interventions taking place throughout the MENA region.
Other modern initiatives are being implemented in Morocco, which could transform the country’s learning and teaching practices. A pilot teacher training program entitled “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” has recently been concluded, and plans for expansion will hopefully be initiated in collaboration with the Ministry of Education.
The program engages teachers and students with the “free knowledge” realm of Wikipedia and provides vital digital literacy skills. Leveraging technology as a classroom tool is cited as a way of supporting better teaching practices.
Despite many significant steps towards progress in the education sector, it is evident in Morocco, as in the rest of the world, that the Coronavirus has had a devastating impact on learning outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has put targets of reducing learning poverty under immense pressure: school closures, a deficit of digital resources, and lack of access to the internet in rural areas continue to be major obstacles for secondary education. 
The full impact of the pandemic on students is yet to be determined, but it remains certain that MENA education officials would do well to heed the advice of the World Bank and develop initiatives to support children in the Arabic speaking world. This endeavour has never been more urgent as students face a “lost year” of school.
Learning poverty, exacerbated by a global health crisis, demands a mutual understanding among MENA countries that advancing Arabic literacy is a reliable path towards development and learning success. 
