Commitment to Education and Youth in UAE

The social responsibility arm of DAMAC Group strongly believes that education plays a key role in empowering young people in the Arab region. It has made education and youth the core of its philanthropic initiatives, cognizant of the huge gap identified by the world’s leading organisations in addressing a mothballing crisis in this part of the world.?

A recently released statement by the International Labour Organization, the UN Development Programme, the UN Population Fund and UNICEF says that “more than 33 million new jobs need to be created in the Middle East and North Africa by 2030” where the unemployment rate amongst young people is the highest in the world.??

Education is key to confronting this enormous challenge, one which requires innovative solutions that will provide Arab youth with the skills necessary to enable them to make productive contributions to society.?

Commitment to education and youth?

It is within this context that the social responsibility arm of DAMAC Group?has?proactively collaborated with The Knowledge Fund and the Dubai Schools Project to offer scholarships to UAE National Children for a 5-year period. ?It also galvanised its resources and support towards education and the youth. For instance, the Group has partnered with?the Dubai Future Foundation to provide software development training to one million people across the Arab world, known as the One Million Arab Coders Initiative, launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.??

As its part of this groupwide commitment, the Group has made education a key consideration in planning its property developments. We make every effort to ensure residents in our master-planned communities and building projects have easy access to good schools either within our developments or in surrounding areas.?

Alignment with UAE’s strategic initiatives?

Our focus on education and youth is strategically aligned with the UAE’s mission to provide a world-class education for its citizens and residents. In its review of the education ecosystem in the Emirates, PwC concluded that “the quality of the UAE’s primary and higher education systems ranked among the top 20 globally”.??

However, the UAE is not only concerned about quality education that focuses on academic competitiveness.?For this reason, the UAE introduced a?Moral Education programme in 2016. Our leaders were not satisfied in providing education, across all levels, that is on par with the world’s best. They want to help create a future generation of children who have the right tools to be best prepared for the challenges they would face when they become adults.??

The programme seeks to inculcate in students across UAE schools positive values such as tolerance, community spirit and compassion. It places a strong premium on helping students achieve academic competence while building their character at the same time, thus enabling them to become positive contributors to society not just in the UAE, but also globally.?

Top priority?

Quality early education must, therefore, be high on our agenda. If we miss doing this intervention at the earliest possible window, we would have let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip by us.?

However, if we succeed in providing quality education in the early childhood years, we would have built a strong foundation for the development of future global citizens who will blaze the trail towards creating a society that?embraces tolerance and inclusiveness, not just economic progress or technological advancement.?

Towards this end, the social responsibility arm of DAMAC Group?reiterates its commitment to empowering our young people through education.?As a home-grown company, it is our duty to be a good corporate citizen and to give back to the community in which we operate.??

We welcome the opportunity to commit resources and support that will positively impact a large and critical segment of our society and have beneficial and multiplier effects for years to come.?