Arab Human Development Report 2003: Building a Knowledge Society

The report affirms that knowledge can help the region to expand the scope of human freedoms, enhance the capacity to guarantee those freedoms through good governance and achieve the higher moral human goals of justice and human dignity. It also underlies the importance of knowledge to Arab countries as a powerful driver of economic groeth through higher productivity. It's closing section puts forward a strategic vision for creating knowledge societies on the Arab world built on five pillars: 1. Guaranteeing the key freedoms of opinion, speech and assembly through good governance bounded by the law. 2. Disseminating high quality education for all. 3. Embedding and ingraining science and building and broadening the capacity for research and development across society. 4. Shifting rapidly towards knowledge-based production in Arab socioeconomic structures. 5. Developing an authentic, broadminded and enlightened Arab knowledge model. AHDR 2003 makes it clear that, in the Arab civilization, the pursuit of knowledge is prompted by religion, culture, history and the human will to achieve success. Obstructions to this quest are the defective structures created by human beings - social, economic and above all political. Arabs must remove or reform these structures in order to take the place they deserve in the world of knowledge at the beginning of the knowledge millennium.