The most important achievements of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation since 2005

Before delving into the details of the OIC activities and programmes, it would be worthwhile to have an overview of progress in certain areas.

Since the adoption of the TYPOA, substantial increases in research budgets have been reported by certain OIC Member States. In certain cases gross R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP nearly doubled.

Prior to the adoption of the TYPOA (in 2003), the OIC Member States were, on an average, spending 0.2% of the GDP on R&D. From 2003 to 2011, this percentage has quadrupled to 0.81% which is in the vicinity of the target set by the TYPOA. In the year 2000 scientific publications in international journals by scientists and engineers from 57 OIC Member States numbered 18, 391. This number increased five folds to 92, 503 in 2011.

In 2003, the number of researchers, scientists and engineers in the OIC countries engaged in R&D was around 250 per million i.e. one-tenth of the world average of 2532 per million. This number has nearly doubled to 457 i.e. one-fifth of the world average. Six Member States have more than 1000 researchers per million people: Tunisia 3240; Jordan 1934; Turkey 1715, Iran, 1491; Azerbaijan 1218; Egypt 1018.

The Global Innovation Index 2012 (GII), published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), lists a number of OIC Member States, such as Malaysia, Jordan and Senegal as good performers.

In the domain of Higher Education, nine universities from the OIC Member States are included in the top 400 World University Rankings Supplement of the QS for 2012.

The next section summarizes some of the key activities, programmes and achievements by the OIC since 2005 in the areas of science, technology 48