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This chapter offers a survey of education development in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), and how the different crises have changed the global dynamics in education. This chapter first gives an overview of the regional context and the history of education in the region, followed by a discussion of the education developments in the region as shaped by the economic growth of high-income countries and the political upheavals in low-income countries. MENA states have made huge investments in their educational systems through implementing major changes in the education policies and introducing initiatives to improve the quality of education in their countries. However, the educational system in the region has not reaped the benefits of these reforms as it has not met the desired goals. The quality of students’ learning is very low as reflected in the poor rating by international assessments such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS. Structural educational reforms to foster citizenship and civic responsibility are urgently needed. Good governance of the education systems of the MENA countries, a critical thinking skills-based curriculum and strong market-oriented skills and vocational training programs are necessary for MENA to become economically competitive and reliably democratic.

Purpose: Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries demonstrate outstanding potential for innovative entrepreneurship due to the undiversified economy it has. The chapter unravels knowledge management’s scope to convert the MENA into a knowledge economy while ensuring sustainable development. Knowledge management through digitalization, big data analytics, and other technology-enabled practices could be embraced through various knowledge clusters and innovation networks.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter proposes a conceptual model based on the quadruple helix model of innovation and associated knowledge and innovation networks operating together through a technology-enabled knowledge management process. MENA’s current status and expected performance are analyzed based on the given model.

Findings: An emergent need to digitalize the institutional operations, and knowledge flow from the four helices of innovation is realized. To ensure economic sustainability, MENA countries need to work on political stability, transparency, and accountability to ensure the flow of reliable knowledge in the knowledge management process. Building human competencies and skills is still a challenge for many MENA countries. Hence, education institutes need to introduce academic programs that are compatible with the labor requirement of the area. Since the region has a youth population in large proportion, human capital formation can bypass the over-population and unemployment challenge and instead become a competitive advantage.

Originality/value: The given chapter explores the knowledge management process, capabilities, benefits, competencies from the perspective of sustainable growth in MENA countries. It also recommends extensive data operations and analytics to enhance the knowledge-based economy.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has witnessed much change over the past few decades. It has experienced the difficulties of post-colonial independence marred by a number of wars. This political instability coupled with too much government control and regulation caused much of the international financial and business community to shun this region for emerging superstars of Southeast Asia. Fund managers estimated that out of a total of US$65 billion of capital floated into emerging markets in the peak year of 1993, only 0.3% trickled to Arab markets. Yet, this region is rich in human capital and natural resources. It is the home of 6% of the world's population with a wealth of highly skilled workers and a gross domestic product (GDP) of over US$600 billion. The region also has some of the world's largest oil reserves. This volume sets out to offer a reappraisal of the performance of international financial arrangements in the MENA region over the past two decades. Reappraisal offers much insight into how countries in the MENA region have been attempting to restructure their financial markets over the past two decades in hopes of attracting and utilizing international capital more effectively. It also proffers an analysis of the future prospects of international capital flows in this region as well as examining a number of case studies for insights into how financial markets operate in the Middle East.

Educational achievement as measured by students’ performance in international tests is receiving scant attention in the educational research. The launch of these tests helped the educational community to better understand the factors underlying students’ achievement and guided the policy makers in their policies. However, Middle East and North African (MENA) countries were underrepresented in these discussions mainly because of data scarcity. Fortunately, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007 data provides data for 15 MENA countries for students at the eighth grade and for many MENA countries; this is the first time that such data is available. This chapter aims to present estimates of students’ family background over mathematics and science scores. The results show that students with abundant home resources perform better than those with less home resources. Moreover, expatriate students in Gulf countries perform better than natives.