Covid-19: The Virus That Devastated Arab Education

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted education around the world, but it had a particularly disruptive effect in the Arab region, which had long avoided online education.

Prior to the pandemic, education ministries in many Arab countries believed that online education was not real education and was prone to student fakery. Foreign distance education providers were often required by Arab governments to have a brick-and-mortar presence, and even then their degrees were not usually recognized.

Working with my managing editor, Rasha Faek, I encouraged our staff and freelance writers to intensively cover the disruption in Arab education and to show how the pandemic was increasing inequity in education. For example, less than half of households in the Arab region even had Internet access.

Our editorial team also tried to point educators and students to resources to get through the pandemic as productively as possible. We created a guide to help Arab students find free or low-cost online courses, especially courses in Arabic. We created a guide for Arab professors on where to find the best advice for building online courses.

Lastly, with SPARK, the Dutch NGO, Al-Fanar Media held an online conference in May 2020 on “Rebuilding Futures: Higher Education and Jobs for Youth During Crisis” to provoke discussion on the transition to online education and job creation in the pandemic environment. In a follow-up survey of attendees, 79 percent of attendees said they “learned something that will change the way I work.”

Having strong core funding from the Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, which I had obtained in the years running up to the pandemic, was key to having the ability to quickly turn Al-Fanar Media’s resources to react to the pandemic, rather than having to hunt for project funding which might be slow to come, if it ever came at all.