Transforming Education in the Middle East - Orlando Ayala

After a few days in London meeting with officials from industry and NGO organizations, I’ve arrived in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates for the next Government Leaders Forum – this time focused on Arabia. Similar to Berlin, I’ll be meeting with partners from both the public and private sectors and talking to people from across the region whose lives have been impacted through our Unlimited Potential and Partners in Learning efforts.

I’d first like to say a few words about a speech Bill Gates delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this past Thursday. In the speech, he introduced the concept of “creative capitalism,” where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces to people who have been left behind economically. The idea behind creative capitalism is that it ties our concern in the success of others to our concern for our own success in ways that help advance both. As Bill describes it, this “hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone.”

The relationship to our work with Unlimited Potential is obvious. In fact, Unlimited Potential is one of the most direct examples of creative capitalism at work—combining the company’s business and philanthropic goals to create new social and economic opportunity for those at the middle and bottom of the world’s economic pyramid. James Utzschneider from my team has done a great job explaining this in more depth.

This brings me back to GLF…

Every time I travel to this region, I’m reminded why it is such a culturally rich and diverse place. Many people know about the growth happening in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but few people know what’s happening in places like Algeria, Jordan and Qatar.

One of the key topics being discussed at the event – one that Bill Gates covered in his keynote here today – is the impact that Microsoft and IT investment has on economic growth throughout the region. Not surprisingly, the two are interrelated, and the result of a robust IT sector is that more local businesses are successful and more jobs are created.

Over the next two days, I’ll be meeting with government delegates from UAE, Qatar, Libya, Algeria and Morocco as well as representatives from a number of NGOs. We will be discussing our business interests as well as how we can partner to implement education and training programs that enable people to get skills that open opportunities. It is tremendously exciting to see the sort of impact we can have by bringing these diverse parties together.

These Public-Private Partnerships are essential to achieving the scalability necessary to reach our goals. One company cannot do this alone; it takes the combined effort of all stakeholders. Public-Private Partnerships are about simple economics – aligning the interests and incentives to improve economic opportunity for all partners, especially the citizens these programs serve. Like Bill said in his Davos speech, incentives are what drive behavior, and we need to find a way to make delivering solutions to underserved populations the right thing to do in the long run.

I also had the chance to speak today with Hessa Abdullah, the principal at Al-Bayan Education Complex for Girls in Qatar, a publicly funded secondary school for young women. One of 12 Microsoft Innovation schools, Al-Bayan is spearheading national education reform in Qatar through their innovative educational programs that utilize technology in new ways. They strive to empower women to not only become digitally literate, but to be inventive thinkers and effective communicators who contribute to national development and a knowledge-based economy.

Since the school was founded in 1999, Al-Bayan has been recognized as a leading independent school, selected by the Supreme Education Council in Qatar to pilot a “research skills and development program, and they’ve begun career and academic counseling, including preparation for the TOEFL, SAT and ACT tests. Today, Qatari women university graduates are increasing, and women are widely participating in the workforce, making a significant contribution to the country’s growth as a knowledge economy. And, at the end of the day, all roads with Partner In Learning must lead to jobs and economic opportunity.

Al-Bayan’s story is one that demonstrates the economic benefits we can all achieve through strategic partnerships and investment in, among other things, education. Microsoft is by no means the only company doing this, and it is my hope we continue to see more companies adopt this approach. When I think back to Bill’s idea of creative capitalism, I believe it is ultimately a paradigm that will shift the entire industry in a new direction. It is not Microsoft’s responsibility to follow in this direction, rather it is Microsoft’s responsibility to lead in this direction. As my travels over the past couple of weeks demonstrate, this will take a lot of time and hard work but by bringing our considerable resources together we can make a difference.