Mobility in MENA – Two steps forward, one step back

The last two decades have seen higher education become increasingly mobile. In 2000 just over two million people studied abroad; by 2019 this has almost tripled to over six million, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 4.5% of all students were internationally mobile in 2019, but most of that mobility was one way – outward bound.

“The agenda for internationalisation in MENA is lagging behind a little compared to other regions,” global education expert Francisco Marmolejo told delegates at the third UNESCO World Higher Education Conference (WHEC2022) in Barcelona, Spain.

The president of higher education at the Qatar Foundation in Doha, Qatar, who is also a former World Bank global higher education coordinator, sees internationalisation as a useful way to boost the quality of MENA higher education and equip people with the right skills for the future.

“In a region with 26% youth unemployment, this has to be something to care about,” he said.

One university from the region that prioritises the international is Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane (AUI), Morocco. Over 60% of teaching staff are either foreign or bi-national and, prior to COVID, 67% of students completed an international placement. All students study in Arabic, French and English.



Open minds for all

“There is an elite in the MENA region that is very open in terms of culture, business and entrepreneurship,” says Amine Bensaid, AUI president. “AUI is trying to democratise this process – how can the average citizen be as open as the elite?” Currently, over 50% of AUI students receive some form of financial support and 54% are first-generation university students.

Many see making people more open minded as one of the benefits of study abroad. As someone who has specialised in studying young people for the past 20 years, Dorra Ben Alaya, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia, has seen how not being able to travel can have the opposite effect.

“The barriers to young people’s mobility make it difficult for them to project themselves into the future. I often notice such young people feel unable to come up with long-term plans,” she said. “Young people from poor areas are usually questioned five or six times every time they leave their neighbourhood. When you transpose this to international mobility, young people experience this as a form of violence.”

Going home

The pandemic has affected the level of internationalisation of MENA universities for good and for bad. When many MENA universities locked down and moved to online classes, most students from abroad went home. At AUI, just 100 international students stayed put through lockdown and university staff spent time liaising with their families to pass on information and reassurance.

On the positive side, as universities moved to online provision, forms of virtual mobility have become more mainstream. “This was something we had been talking about for years and suddenly it became a reality,” says Marmolejo. At AUI, many academics were unfamiliar with using technology for academic purposes. “Now more are reaching out to international partners to say let’s do programmes together,” said Bensaid.

Challenging technology

The move to online provision has also brought about a shift in the balance of student-teacher relations, according to Ben Alaya.

“The pandemic has made people question the status of teachers and forced us to face up to our weak points,” she says. “We had to use technology that the students know very well so we had to learn from them.”

The pandemic presented teachers with more challenges than it did students, she believes. Ben Alaya hopes we are now moving towards a more co-operative relationship, where “it’s not about transferring knowledge, it’s about co-creating a way of learning together”.

Governments can play a role to in encouraging stronger internationalisation of MENA universities. This could be by providing financial support for students from poorer backgrounds or by working to make visas easier to obtain, according to Bensaid. Virtual mobility can also contribute to internationalisation, but it must meet criteria for quality if it is to deliver real benefits.

Promoting mobility within the MENA region itself could also have positive effects, according to Marmolejo. “Sadly, the MENA region does not count much on the map of mobility, but we have enough diversity in the region to organise an energetic exchange network,” he says. “This is the only way we can gain visibility for international mobility, but there is a lot of work to be done if this is going to happen.”