OVERVIEW
laws that still limit women’s access to productive assets.15
Realigning incentives for skills that matter In a region that generates far too few jobs, and far too few high-quality jobs, and where merit influences the allocation of jobs to only a limited extent, the educational and training systems receive scrambled signals that do not emphasize skill acquisition as the route to employment. Instead, the signal is to acquire the “right” degree from the “right” university and then queue for a public sector job. The results are little pressure to change traditional patterns of pedagogy (which maintain high selectivity and rigid tracking), a declining TVET system, and eventually a system with relatively poor outcomes at the end of the compulsory schooling cycle. The key to increasing productivity and restoring a sense of dignity and agency among MENA’s young people is for educational and training systems to become more accountable to people, more responsive to the private sector, and more capable of promoting labor markets that value and recognize individual skills and competencies in a transparent, merit-based manner. If those goals are met, the incentives of students and educational systems will be reoriented toward the acquisition and provision of more relevant skills, provided that competition in the private sector becomes stronger, a level playing field is created between public and private employment, and labor markets in general are revitalized. At the same time, a number of institutional features can affect the ability of educational and training systems to productively capture and respond to these changes. Closing stakeholders’ information and knowledge gaps More access to education and training is not enough to realign incentives to teach and acquire the most relevant skills. To know which skills are required, and where,
the large information and knowledge gaps related to learning outcomes and the supply of and demand for skills must be closed. This effort entails monitoring and evaluating the quality of education and, at the same time, reforming assessment and certification systems. Addressing knowledge and information failures, including through counseling throughout secondary school, will allow employers to better communicate what they require from the educational system, schools, and educators to improve quality and to better assess and certify learning, and families and students to make better decisions and form realistic expectations about the transition from education to work. Overall, more systematic, accurate, and publicly available information on what is accomplished by education and training will lead to more solid accountability of all institutions and actors involved. Value learning and problem solving The ultimate challenge for education in the 21st century is a paradoxical one: to design a race where everybody can win and where everyone has multiple ways to win. International experience shows that this goal can be achieved by making educational and training systems, particularly those at the secondary and TVET level, more inclusive, more directed toward learning, and less directed toward selecting and exclusively rewarding the academically able while leaving the rest behind. The priority is to prevent students from dropping out and to identify alternative training itineraries so that everyone can acquire relevant skills for a successful school-to-work transition. Empower the private sector and realign incentives for public sector hiring Making employability count through a renewed partnership between educational and training systems and the private sector will help align incentives. A new and more effective public-private partnership
31