Arab Human Development Report

The Arab Human Development Report is an independent report sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), providing leading Arab scholars a platform through which to analyze the challenges and opportunities for human development in the Arab Region. UNDP's Arab Human Development Report Project maintains a Web site on which copies of the Reports are available for download in the Arabic, English and French languages.

Building on the tradition of UNDP's global Human Development Reports, the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) is a series of publications focused on challenges and opportunities for human development in the Arab region. The reports are carried out by an independent team of leading Arab scholars and researchers, and published by UNDP, which supports the project as part of its efforts to foster a healthy debate on development priorities within the region.

Work on the AHDR series was launched in 2000 as a way to respond to a sense of urgency among Arab thinkers as to the precipitous situation of Arab countries at the start of the new millennium. The first AHDR (2002) provided a full spectrum diagnostic of factors accounting for shortfalls in the area of human development, and summarized its findings by pointing to three major "development deficits" holding the region's progress back: (i) knowledge, (ii) women’s empowerment and (iii) freedom. These were the respective themes of the three follow-up reports published in 2003, 2004, and 2005, which completed the first series of the AHDR.

The first series of the AHDR made the vital contribution of injecting the Human Development concept into the Arab debate, as well as adding new rigor and frameworks to the consideration of specific development deficits. In their respective areas of focus, the Reports offered a wealth of far reaching, relevant, and at-times-hard-hitting policy recommendations for governments, civil society and international partners. Not all messages were well received by all partners, but many of the messages enjoyed the endorsement of several governments in the region, and the Reports were discussed in hearings and meetings among Arab Foreign Ministers and the League of Arab States. At the same time, universities across the region and the world adopted the AHDR series into their curricula, and the Reports were energetically explored in various policy contexts by think-tanks, civil society groups and development institutions across the Arab region and beyond. Moreover, private foundations in the region absorbed and amplified the Reports’ messages. In short, a new set of ideas had been introduced into the regional debate, a contribution toward a reform agenda that has potential to stimulate productive discussion in order to put the pursuit of Arab human development on track.

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