Morocco and Qatar in joint higher education initiatives

Morocco and Qatar have unveiled a higher education cooperation plan that includes setting up a joint institution in the North African country’s capital Rabat and a cross-border campus of a Moroccan university in the Arab nation’s capital Doha, along with networking opportunities among universities to boost learning.

“Hosting Morocco’s branch campus in Qatar and establishing joint universities in Morocco is part of a broader nationwide strategy, known as [Qatar National] Vision 2030, that aims to transform the country into a knowledge-based economy,” Samir Khalaf Abd-El-Aal, a science expert at the National Research Centre in Cairo, Egypt, told University World News.

The cooperation plan was the outcome of a meeting between Morocco and Qatar’s ministries of higher education, held in the Moroccan capital Rabat on 14 May, according to the website of Morocco’s Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Professional Training.

Qatar will provide funding to establish the Morocco-Qatar University in Rabat, while Morocco will set up a campus for the Mohammed V University in Doha.

The Qatar-based branch campus of Mohammed V University is its third cross-border campus after it established two branches in the United Arab Emirates, including Mohammed V University Agdal, Abu Dhabi, and Mohammed V University, Ajman.

The planned branch campus of Morocco’s Mohammed V University is considered the first Arab branch campus in Qatar, in addition to 11 Western branch campuses from universities in the United States (6), Canada (2), the United Kingdom (1), France (1) and the Netherlands (1), according to a US News report.

“It also could be considered as a higher education diplomacy tool to counter Qatar’s regional isolation brought about by four Arab nations, namely, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt in June 2017 over the peninsula’s alleged support for terrorism,” Abd-El-Aal said.

A diplomatic freeze for almost a year has had a negative effect on higher education and scientific research activities, according to a December 2017 news report headlined “Qatar’s science suffers under Arab blockade”.

Rachael Merola, senior researcher at the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, told University World News it was good to have a mix of universities and a mix of education on offer.

“Higher education cooperation, whether local, regional or international, is always beneficial. The focus these days is on employability among graduates, and so the greater the alignment between the education outcomes of graduates and the needs of the labour market, the better for the development of the nation,” Merola said.

“Morocco is one of the main educational centres in North Africa, and as such, represents an important access to an educated community. Moreover, traditionally North Africa is influenced by the French education, which is quite different from the American education currently in Qatar,” said Marina Apaydin, assistant professor of strategic management at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and director of the Middle East and North Africa Regional Case Initiative.

“Diversity in education is always better, especially that North African countries are much closer to Qatar in terms of culture than Western universities,” Apaydin said.

“Host governments have a range of motives for allowing or encouraging foreign universities to establish international branch campuses in their territories,” transnational education expert Nigel Healey, vice-chancellor of Fiji National University, told University World News. “In some cases, it is to ‘absorb demand’ if the local universities cannot meet the demand for places. In others, it is to create ‘education hubs’ to attract international students to study in the host country.”

“For Qatar, unusually, hosting international branch campuses has always been geopolitical – to project ‘soft power’ by connecting Qatar with elite universities around the world,” Healey said.

Hilal Lashuel, associate professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland, and former executive director of the Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, said one needs to ask what would be the added value of having a new university in Qatar?

“To answer this question, you will have to assess the academic and research landscape in Qatar and align the needs or gaps with the strengths and unique features of the academic programmes at Mohammed V University,” Lashuel said.