In 2009, UNESCO and TAGORG signed a cooperation agreement to establish knowledge societies in the Arab region and promote Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support education, science and culture in the Arab region

AMMAN---July 25, 2012----The United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization (TAG-Org) have announced the completion of the data compilation phase of their jointly developed “ICT in Education Indicators” project after completing a two-day consultant mission to each of the countries included in the first phase of the project.

In 2009, UNESCO and TAG-Org signed a cooperation agreement to establish knowledge societies in the Arab region and promote Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support education, science and culture in the Arab region.

This vision of building an Arab Knowledge Society was the brainchild of Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, chairman of TAG-Org and was translated through establishing the first online database (the Arab ICT Portal) which would include all statistical information related to the use and penetration of ICT in the Arab region depending on the indicators that were suggested by the UN’s Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development.

The UNESCO/TAG-Org project aims at creating a credible source of unified information across all countries that would drive data from various local sources.

This project represents a groundbreaking attempt to put in place internationally standardized concepts and indicator measurement specifications that will ensure consistent use and interpretation of ICT in education statistics among policymakers, statisticians, researchers, experts and statistical institutions across the Arab world. Given the rapidly evolving nature of ICT, the outcome of this project should be viewed as a living document, subject to future refinements.

The proposed ICT in education indicators have been based on data that was generated within existing official administrative sources rather than on irregular, costly or external resource-dependant national surveys in order to ensure long-term sustainability in data collection efforts for the majority of countries.

The project is expected to be completed by the end of the year where the UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics is to produce a detailed analytical report on ICT Usage in Education in the region using the data that was collected by the consultants.