Societal Issues Lecture Notes PDF

South Valley University Qena Faculty of Education Department of Educational Psychology Lectures on SOCIETAL ISSUES For 1st year students Prepare...

South Valley University Qena Faculty of Education Department of Educational Psychology Lectures on SOCIETAL ISSUES For 1st year students Prepared by Mahsoub A. A. Hassan Professor of Educational Psychology First Term Academic Year 2024-2025  UNIT 1 CORRUPTION ISSUE INTRODUCTION Corruption is a widespread phenomenon in all countries; large or small, rich and poor. However, Its impacts in the developing world are more influential. It has a wide range of harmful effects on societies; It leads to human rights abuse, market distortion and deterioration in the quality of life. It also allows organized crime and terrorism to thrive, along with other threats that are considered an obstacle to the flourishing of human security. Corruption is a global phenomenon that causes poverty, obstructs development and drives away investment. It also debilitates the judicial and political systems that should be working for the public good. Not surprisingly, as the rule of law is weakened and the voice of the people remains unheard, citizens' trust in government officials and national institutions dwindles. WHAT IS CORRUPTION? We define corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Corruption erodes trust, weakens democracy, hampers economic development and further exacerbates inequality, poverty, social division and the environmental crisis. Exposing corruption and holding the corrupt to account can only happen if we understand the way corruption works and the systems that enable it. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 1 of 94  So, corruption is the misuse of public power for private gain. It is a form of dishonest or unethical conduct by a person entrusted with a position of authority, often to acquire personal benefit. WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF CORRUPTION There are two major types of corruption: Petty Corruption Everyday abuse of entrusted power by public officials in their interactions with ordinary citizens, who often are trying to access basic goods or services in places like hospitals, schools, police departments and other agencies. Means the corruption which is done on the small scale or the low-level. Petty corruption occurs at a smaller scale and takes place at the implementation end of public services when public officials meet the public. For example, in many small places such as registration offices, police stations, state licensing boards, and many other private and government sectors. It may seem minor, but it erodes trust in institutions and fosters a culture of dishonesty. Grand (State) Corruption In contrast to "petty corruption", high-level or "grand" corruption is perpetrated at the highest levels of government and usually involves both substantial benefits for the officials involved and significant losses for the state and its citizens. The corruption which is done in the big scale or the high- level. Grand corruption is further categorized as political corruption that is the use of powers by government officials or their network contacts for illegitimate private gain. For example, to win the election, some political leaders try to lure the voters by offering them wine, wealth and other types of direct or indirect benefits. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 2 of 94  Grand corruption is defined as corruption occurring at the highest levels of government in a way that requires significant subversion of the political, legal and economic systems. Such corruption is commonly found in countries with authoritarian or dictatorial governments but also in those without adequate policing of corruption. Still, it can also occur in democracies lacking effective corruption oversight. This type of corruption typically involves large-scale embezzlement, bribery, or fraud that affects national policies and governance, hindering development and eroding public trust. combatting it requires robust institutions, transparency, and accountability measures. The government system in many countries is divided into the legislative, executive and judicial branches in an attempt to provide independent services that are less subject to grand corruption due to their independence from one another. THE BASICS Corruption can take many forms, and can include behaviors like: public servants demanding or taking money or favours in exchange for services, politicians misusing public money or granting public jobs or contracts to their sponsors, friends and families, corporations bribing officials to get lucrative deals Corruption can happen anywhere: in business, government, the courts, the media, and in civil society, as well as across all sectors from health and education to infrastructure and sports. Corruption can involve anyone: politicians, government officials, public servants, business people or members of the public. Corruption happens in the shadows, often with the help of professional enablers such as bankers, lawyers, accountants and real estate agents, opaque financial systems and anonymous shell ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 3 of 94 companies that allow corruption schemes to flourish and the corrupt to launder and hide their illicit wealth. Corruption adapts to different contexts and changing circumstances. It can evolve in response to changes in rules, legislation and even technology. FORMS OF CORRUPTION Forms (Types) of corruption vary, but can include bribery, lobbying, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, parochialism, patronage, influence peddling, graft, fraud and embezzlement. Corruption may facilitate criminal enterprise such as drug trafficking, money laundering, and human trafficking, though it is not restricted to these activities. Lobbying Any activity carried out to influence a government or institution's policies and decisions in favour of a specific cause or outcome. Lobbying is an essential tool for stakeholders to make their voice heard with politicians and public officials. Citizens engage in lobbying when they write to their elected representative or join a protest, etc. Professional lobbyists, by contrast, are paid to advocate for specific interest of their clients before responsible public officials. They are sometimes former officials themselves, hired due to their knowledge of the issues and contacts in the sector. But terms of engagement of former public officials are usually clear and limited in order to distinguish permissible lobbying from illegal trading in influence. Bribery The offer or exchange of money, services or other valuables to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of entrusted power. The benefit does not need to go to the official in ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 4 of 94 question directly – it can go to a spouse, a child, another relative, a friend, or even to the official's political party as a donation. A bribe is sometimes paid after the fact – for instance, in monthly instalments to the official issuing permits to street vendors as long as they are allowed to operate. This form of bribery is called a kickback. Bribery is widely criminalised, and both the party paying the bribe and the party receiving may be liable. active bribery: the promising, offering or giving by any person, directly or indirectly, of any undue advantage to any of its public officials, for himself or herself or for anyone else, for him or her to act or refrain from acting in the exercise of his or her functions. Passive bribery: when committed intentionally, the request or receipt by any [...] public officials, directly or indirectly, of any undue advantage, for himself or herself or for anyone else, or the acceptance of an offer or a promise of such an advantage, to act or refrain from acting in the exercise of his or her functions. Extortion Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit (e.g., money or goods) through coercion. In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offence; the bulk of this article deals with such cases. Robbery is the simplest and most common form of extortion, although making unfounded threats in order to obtain an unfair business advantage is also a form of extortion. Nepotism and cronyism Nepotism is a form of favouritism involving family relationships, in which someone exploits his or her authority to procure jobs or other favours for relatives. When this treatment is extended to friends and associates, the appropriate term is cronyism. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 5 of 94  Favoring relatives (nepotism) or personal friends (cronyism) of an official is a form of illegitimate private gain. Nepotism is the act of granting an advantage, privilege, or position to relatives. Cronyism is the act of granting an advantage, privilege or position to friends. Parochialism is the state of mind whereby one focuses on small sections of an issue rather than considering its wider context. More generally, it consists of being narrow in scope. Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. The support or sponsorship of a patron (wealthy or influential guardian). Patronage is used to make appointments to government jobs, promotions, contracts for work, etc. The desire to gain power, wealth and status through their behaviour motivates most patrons. Patronage violates the boundaries of legitimate political influence and the principles of merit. Influence peddling also called traffic of influence or trading in influence, is the practice of using one's influence in government or connections with authorities to obtain favours or preferential treatment for another, usually in return for payment. Graft Graft is a form of political corruption defined as the unscrupulous use of a politician's authority for personal gain. Political graft occurs when funds intended for public projects are intentionally misdirected in order to maximize the benefits to private interests. Political graft functions when the public officer is ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 6 of 94 directed to purchase goods or services from a specific private interest at a cost far above regular market rates. Political corruption is the use of powers by government officials or their network contacts for illegitimate private gain. Embezzlement Embezzlement is a term commonly used for a type of financial crime, usually involving theft of money from a business or employer. It often involves a trusted individual taking advantage of their position to steal funds or assets, most commonly over a period of time. Embezzlement is the purposeful stealing, retention, or misuse of funds and/or assets entrusted to an employee by an employer or organization. The misappropriation of property or funds legally entrusted to someone in their formal position as an agent or guardian. Accountants and financial managers typically have access to an agency's funds and so are in a position to embezzle them. Other forms of embezzlement include the taking of supplies, equipment, etc. Money laundering Any act or attempted act disguising the source of money or assets from criminal activity. Money laundering includes concealing the origins and the use of the illegal assets. It is often used to hide the proceeds of corruption, and is practiced by drug traffickers, human traffickers, kleptocrats and white-collar criminals. Bank secrecy makes laundered money particularly hard to trace. Fraud Deliberate deception or misrepresentation to gain an unfair or unlawful advantage, often involving the manipulation of financial ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 7 of 94 or official records. While fraud is a significant issue in many parts of the world, including developing countries, it is important to note that corruption takes various forms, and the prevalence of specific types of corruption can vary across different regions and contexts. Fraud is a type of corruption that involves deliberate deception or misrepresentation to gain an unfair advantage or financial benefit. It can occur in both public and private sectors and can have severe economic and social consequences. Addressing fraud requires a comprehensive approach that combines legal and regulatory reforms, capacity building, public awareness campaigns, and international cooperation. Strengthening governance systems, enhancing financial oversight, promoting transparency, and investing in technological infrastructure are vital components in combating fraud. The fraud triangle is a framework commonly used in auditing to explain the reason behind an individual’s decision to commit fraud. The fraud triangle outlines three components that contribute to increasing the risk of fraud: (1) opportunity, (2) incentive, and (3) rationalization. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 8 of 94 The Fraud Triangle – Opportunity Opportunity refers to circumstances that allow fraud to occur. In the fraud triangle, it is the only component that a company exercises complete control over. Examples that provide opportunities for committing fraud include: 1. Weak internal controls Internal controls are processes and procedures implemented to ensure the integrity of accounting and financial information. Weak internal controls such as poor separation of duties, lack of supervision, and poor documentation of processes give rise to opportunities for fraud. 2. Poor tone at the top Tone at the top refers to upper management and the board of directors’ commitment to being ethical, showing integrity, and being honest – a poor tone at the top results in a company that is more susceptible to fraud. 3. Inadequate accounting policies Accounting policies refer to how items on the financial statements are recorded. Poor (inadequate) accounting policies may provide an opportunity for employees to manipulate numbers. The Fraud Triangle – Incentive Incentive, alternatively called pressure, refers to an employee’s mindset towards committing fraud. Examples of things that provide incentives for committing fraud include: 1. Bonuses based on a financial metric Common financial metrics used to assess the performance of an employee are revenues and net income. Bonuses that are based on a financial metric create pressure for employees to meet ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 9 of 94 targets, which, in turn, may cause them to commit fraud to achieve the objective. 2. Investor and analyst expectations The need to meet or exceed investor and analyst expectations to ensure stock prices are maintained or increased can create pressure to commit fraud. 3. Personal incentives Personal incentives may include wanting to earn more money, the need to pay personal bills, a gambling addiction, etc. The Fraud Triangle – Rationalization Rationalization refers to an individual’s justification for committing fraud. Examples of common rationalizations that fraud committers use include: 1. “They treated me wrong” An individual may be spiteful towards their manager or employer and believe that committing fraud is a way of getting payback. 2. “Upper management is doing it as well” A poor tone at the top may cause an individual to follow in the footsteps of those higher in the corporate hierarchy. 3. “There is no other solution” An individual may believe that they might lose everything (for example, losing a job) unless they commit fraud. ANOTHER TYPES OF CORRUPTION There are many types of corruption according to the nature of the corrupt act. In terms of the nature of the corrupt act, corruption can be administrative, political, financial, moral or cultural: ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 10 of 94  Administrative corruption Corruption is administrative if it relates to the abuse of power by executive authority employees. Corruption occurring at the interface between the state, represented by public officials/bureaucrats in decision-making positions and the public/citizens when they need a service. For example, when a citizen coming to take out an ID card is only provided this service if he/she pay the bureaucrat an unofficial payment in addition to the official fee. Political corruption Corruption is political if it relates to the abuse of power and deviant practices issued by the political elite. Sometimes it is difficult to accurately differentiate between some forms of administrative and political corruption because of the overlapped reasons and the interaction between these two types that can be inseparable. Social corruption Corruption is social if it relates to glitch in social values. Moral corruption Corruption is moral if it relates to moral deviations and the individual’s undisciplined behavior that is regulated by religion, traditions or acceptable social custom. moral corruption is a form of social corruption as well. Cultural corruption Corruption is cultural when any cultural group deviates from the general constants and seeks to dismantle its identity and characteristics, and compromises the positions of purgatory and chastity in its culture. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 11 of 94  Financial corruption Corruption is financial if it relates to financial deviations and violation of the provisions and rules adopted in the state’s organizations and institutions, with violation of the regulations and instructions of financial control. It is also a violation of the law by adopting illegal ways to achieve financial gains. In Egypt, baksheesh is often requested on top of fares to taxi drivers, and as service charges to waiters, doormen, shopkeepers, garage attendants, and many others employed in service-sector jobs. THE COSTS OF CORRUPTION Political costs: affect Your freedom and rule of law Social costs: affect Your participation and even your trust in government. Environmental costs: affect Your chance for a healthy environment and a sustainable future. Economic costs: affect Your opportunity to build and grow wealth. CONSEQUENCES Consequences on politics, administration, and institutions Consequences on economy Environmental and social effects Effects on humanitarian aid Effects on health Effects on education Other areas: public safety, trade unions, police corruption, etc. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 12 of 94  THE IMPACT OF CORRUPTION Corruption has wide-ranging impacts that can be detrimental to societies, economies, institutions, and individuals.Here are some key impacts of corruption: Economic Impact Corruption impedes economic development and hampers growth. It distorts markets, undermines fair competition, and diverts resources away from productive activities. Corruption leads to misallocation of public funds, reduces foreign investment, increases costs for businesses, and hinders economic stability and prosperity. Poverty and Inequality Corruption exacerbates poverty and contributes to income inequality. When resources meant for public services and poverty alleviation programs are siphoned off through corruption, it deprives the most vulnerable populations of essential services such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure development. Corruption perpetuates a cycle of poverty and deepens socio- economic disparities. Weakening of Institutions Corruption erodes the credibility, effectiveness, and legitimacy of public institutions. It undermines the rule of law, weakens democratic processes, and erodes public trust in government and public administration. Corrupt practices weaken the capacity of institutions to deliver public services, enforce laws, and uphold the rights of citizens. Lack of Social Justice Corruption undermines social justice and fairness. It allows the powerful and wealthy to bypass regulations, gain undue advantages, and perpetuate systems of privilege and ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 13 of 94 discrimination. This further marginalizes vulnerable groups, perpetuates social inequalities, and hinders social progress. Impaired Public Services Corruption adversely affects the quality and accessibility of public services such as healthcare, education, infrastructure, and public safety. Funds allocated for these services may be embezzled, misused, or redirected, resulting in substandard services, limited access, and compromised public welfare. Erosion of Trust and Civic Engagement Corruption erodes public trust in institutions and leaders. When corruption is pervasive, citizens may become disillusioned, leading to apathy, disengagement, and a loss of faith in democratic processes. This undermines social cohesion, civic participation, and the overall functioning of a democratic society. Environmental Damage Corruption can have severe environmental impacts. It may result in illegal activities such as deforestation, illegal mining, and illegal wildlife trade, where natural resources are exploited for personal gain. Corruption hampers environmental regulation and enforcement efforts, leading to ecological degradation and loss of biodiversity. Security and Organized Crime Corruption can undermine security and contribute to the growth of organized crime. Corrupt practices can facilitate money laundering, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and other illicit activities. These criminal networks further undermine stability, weaken institutions, and pose threats to national and global security. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 14 of 94  Addressing corruption requires a comprehensive approach that includes strong legal frameworks, robust enforcement mechanisms, transparent and accountable governance, promotion of ethical values, and active citizen participation. Efforts to combat corruption can lead to improved economic performance, enhanced social justice, strengthened institutions, and a more inclusive and equitable society. THE CORRUPTION AS A CHRONIC DISEASE OF DEVELOPING WORLD Corruption is often considered a chronic disease that affects many developing countries. It can hinder economic growth, exacerbate poverty, and undermine the overall development of these nations. Here are some key reasons why corruption tends to be more prevalent in the developing world: Lack of institutional capacity Developing countries may have weak institutions, including law enforcement agencies, judiciary systems, and regulatory bodies. These institutions may lack resources, expertise, and independence, making it easier for corrupt practices to thrive. Poverty and inequality: Poverty and income disparities are often more pronounced in developing nations. This can create an environment where corruption flourishes, as individuals in positions of power may exploit their authority to extract bribes or embezzle funds for personal gain. Limited access to basic services Corruption can have a severe impact on the delivery of essential public services such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure development. When resources meant for public welfare are misappropriated or diverted through corrupt practices, the most vulnerable populations suffer the most. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 15 of 94  Lack of transparency and accountability Transparency and accountability mechanisms, such as open government initiatives, independent media, and whistleblower protection, are crucial in combating corruption. However, in many developing countries, such mechanisms are weak or non-existent, making it easier for corrupt activities to go undetected and unpunished. Cultural and societal factors Certain cultural and societal factors can contribute to the prevalence of corruption. For example, informal networks and personal connections (known as "cronyism" or "nepotism") may play a significant role in decision-making processes, leading to favoritism and corruption. Addressing corruption in the developing world requires a comprehensive approach. It involves building strong institutions, promoting transparency and accountability, strengthening the rule of law, improving public financial management systems, fostering a culture of integrity, and promoting international cooperation to combat cross-border corruption. It is a challenging task that requires the commitment and involvement of governments, civil society organizations, and the international community. FIGHTING CORRUPTION Anti-Corruption is a term used to designate the range of approaches to combat corruption. Many broader good governance and democracy-promotion approaches produce similar outcomes, even if they are not explicitly labelled as "anti-corruption.". To fight corruption, we must embrace transparency. Transparency is all about knowing who, why, what, how and how much. It means shedding light on formal and informal rules, plans, processes and actions. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 16 of 94  Transparency helps us, the public, hold all power to account for the common good. Seeking and receiving information is a human right that can act as a safeguard against corruption, and increase trust in decision makers and public institutions. However, transparency is not only about making information available, but ensuring it can be easily accessed, understood and used by citizens. Transparency is the quality of being open, communicative and accountable. It implies that governments and other agencies have a duty to act visibly and understandably. Transparency can lead to improved resource allocation, enhanced efficiency, and better prospects for economic growth. Governance goes further than traditional conceptions of government. It focuses on relationships between leaders, public institutions and citizens. It includes decision-making and implementation processes. Governance can also apply to companies and NGOs. Integrity means following of a set of moral or ethical principles. A National Integrity System is an assessment methodology developed by the NGO Transparency International. It evaluates key ‘pillars’ in a country’s governance system, both in terms of its internal corruption risks and their contribution to fighting corruption in society at large. When all the pillars are functioning well, corruption remains in check. Where some or all of the pillars are weak, this can allow corruption to thrive. HOW TO RESOLVE OR MINIMIZE THE CORRUPTION To resolve or minimize corruption, particularly in poor developing countries, a comprehensive and multi-faceted approach is required. Here are a few points that can contribute to addressing this issue: ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 17 of 94  Strengthening legal and institutional frameworks Implement and enforce robust anti-corruption laws and regulations. Establish independent anti-corruption agencies and ombudsman offices to investigate and prosecute corruption cases. Enhance the capacity and independence of the judiciary to ensure fair and impartial trials. Promoting transparency and accountability Increase transparency in public administration by implementing measures such as open data initiatives, disclosure of financial information, and public access to government decision- making processes. Implement mechanisms for citizen participation and oversight, including social audits and participatory budgeting, to ensure accountability in resource allocation. Enhancing integrity in public service Establish strict codes of conduct and ethics for public officials, including provisions for asset declaration and conflict of interest management. Provide adequate training and capacity- building for public servants to promote ethical behavior and integrity in their roles. Encourage a merit-based recruitment and promotion system to reduce nepotism and favoritism. Encouraging citizen engagement and civil society participation Foster an active and empowered civil society that can act as a watchdog, advocating for transparency, accountability, and anti- corruption measures. Support the work of investigative journalism, whistleblowers, and non-governmental organizations in exposing corruption and holding authorities accountable. Strengthening financial and procurement systems: Implement transparent and competitive procurement processes, ensuring adequate oversight and auditing. Enhance financial management systems, including budgeting, revenue collection, and expenditure tracking, to reduce opportunities for embezzlement and misappropriation of funds. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 18 of 94  Promoting international cooperation and support Foster international collaboration and assistance in combating corruption, including the recovery of stolen assets, extradition of corrupt individuals, and cooperation in investigating transnational corruption cases. Encourage developed countries and international organizations to provide technical and financial support for capacity-building and institutional reforms. Promoting a culture of integrity and ethics Raise public awareness about the detrimental effects of corruption and promote a culture of integrity, transparency, and ethical behavior. This can be done through education, public campaigns, and the integration of anti-corruption topics in school curricula. Addressing socio-economic factors Address the root causes of corruption by promoting inclusive economic growth, reducing poverty and inequality, and ensuring equal access to basic services and opportunities for all. Improve the living conditions of citizens, including access to healthcare, education, clean water, and infrastructure, to reduce the vulnerability to corrupt practices. It's important to note that combating corruption is a complex and long-term process that requires sustained commitment and efforts from all stakeholders involved. Implementing these measures in conjunction with each other can contribute to minimizing corruption and creating a more transparent, accountable, and equitable society. EGYPT’S ANTI-CORRUPTION BODIES Egypt has many anti-corruption agencies such as the Administrative Control Authority, the Accountability State ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 19 of 94 Authority, and the Financial Regulatory Authority, ….etc. Which play a role in combating all forms of corruption. Accountability State Authority (ASA) The Accountability State Authority (ASA) is an independent auditing institution established in Egypt in 1942 as an instrument of public finance control. The ASA supervises the management of public- sector companies and government departments, including about 130 central government departments and administrative units, 120 service agencies, 27 governorates, 50 economic authorities and more than 160 state-owned enterprises, political parties, trade unions, national and party news media, and all units subsidised by the State. The ASA may also audit and examine the work and accounts of any other entity, as assigned by the President, the Prime Minister or the People's Assembly of Egypt. It is independent of the cabinet, and reports directly to the President of Egypt, to whom it is subordinated. the Administrative Control Authority (ACA) The Administrative Control Authority (ACA) is Egypt’s independent general oversight body that exercises administrative, financial, and criminal control over the public bodies. Established in 1964, the ACA takes pride in being Egypt’s long-standing authority dedicated to combating corruption, addressing predicaments impeding justice, co-formulating and implementing national anti-corruption strategies, and raising awareness of corruption's pernicious repercussions. The Administrative Control Authority has integral, fast- growing role in preventing and combating corruption. This, alongside the role of the ACA-affiliated academy, the Egyptian ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 20 of 94 Anti-Corruption Academy (EACA) and its specialized programs in qualifying national and international capacities in the field of governance and preventing and combating corruption. International Conventions United Nations Conventions Against Corruption United Nations Convention on Transnational Organized Crime and Supplementary Protocols Arab Anti-Corruption Convention FATF Convention (Money Laundering) Middle East and North Africa Convention against Corruption Scope of Competences The government administrative body and its branches. Public agencies and their affiliates Public sector and its subsidiaries Public and private associations and private sector agencies that engage in public work All agencies to which the state contributes in any way The competences of the ACA in accordance with its establishment law No. 54 of 1964, as amended by Law No. 207 of 2017 Examining and investigating the causes of the shortfalls of work and production and propose ways to avoid them. Detection of the flaws of administrative, technical and financial systems that hinder the regular functioning of public agencies and propose ways to avoid them. Monitoring the implementation of laws and ensuring that the applicable decrees, regulations and by-laws are adequate for their purpose. Detection of administrative, financial and technical violations committed by the employees in the course of performing their duties or resulting thereof. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 21 of 94  Uncover and detection of criminal offences committed by non-employees, which aim at harming the safety of the performance of the duties of the job or the public service. Examining complaints filed by citizens about violation of laws or negligence in performing the duties of the job and their proposals for insights or recommendations with the aim of improving services, streamlining workflow and speed of completion. Examining and study of the complaints or reportages published by the press addressing aspects of negligence, recklessness, mismanagement or exploitation, as well as the news about these aspects published by various media. Providing the Prime Minister, ministers and governors with any data, information or studies they request. New Competencies introduced by Law No. 207 of 2017 Uncover and detection of crimes aimed at obtaining or attempting to obtain any profit or benefit by impersonating a civil servant, holder of a public office at civil agency or the name of a civil agency provided for by article (4) of this Law. Crimes related to the regulation of foreign exchange transactions provided for under the Central Bank, Banking and Monetary Law No. 194 of 2020 in accordance with its provisions. Crimes provided for under Law 5 of 2010 on the regulation of human organ transplantation. Crimes provided for under Law No. 64 of 2010 on combating human trafficking. Developing and monitoring the implementation of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy in partnership with other relevant bodies and agencies in Egypt. Cooperation, coordination and exchange of expertise, documents and information with the state's regulatory ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 22 of 94  bodies and agencies and other anti-corruption agencies around the world. Spreading the values of integrity and transparency and working to raise community awareness of the dangers of corruption and ways of cooperation to prevent and combat it. in so doing, the ACA collaborates with all concerned agencies and civil society organizations. Follow up on the results of international, regional and local indicators for prevention and combating corruption and making the necessary recommendations to avoid any negative impacts resulting from these indicators and monitoring implementation periodically and evaluating the performance of those responsible for implementation. In addition to the following: Assisting the government, public agencies and the public business sector in investigating the incumbents of senior management positions and candidates for medals and decorations. Investigating cases of illicit gains in implementation of the Illicit Gains Law and based on the decisions of the examination and investigation agencies of the Illicit Gains Authority. Investigating financial transactions suspected of involving money laundering in coordination and exchange of information with the central bank's anti-money laundering unit. National Strategy National Anti-Corruption Strategy 2014-2018 Phase II of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy 2019-2022 Guide to periodic follow-up reports of agencies involved in the implementation of the National Anti-Corruption Strategy 2019-2022 ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 23 of 94  UNIT 2 EDUCATION ISSUE IN EGYPT INTRODUCTION Egypt has the largest pre-university education system in the Middle East and North Africa region, with over 25 million students. The country places high priority on education through the constitutional provision for compulsory and free basic education and government spending for pre-university education – no less than 4% of the gross domestic product. While the education in Egypt has improved in recent years, systemic challenges include low performance – only 19% of grade 4 students demonstrate foundational reading skills and 29% for math – insufficient classroom space to accommodate the current student population, and 1.5 million out-of-school children. Egypt aims to ensure universal access to high-quality education and training, foundational learning for all and skills for the sustainable future. As part of Egypt’s overarching Strategic Vision 2030, the government has developed a five-year education sector plan (ESP) for reforming the education system, structured around four policy priority pillars: access and participation, quality of learning and teaching, equity and inclusion and governance and management of the system. Across all pillars is a focus on digital transformation as well as a strong teacher workforce. The ESP has been independently appraised and endorsed by education development partners in Egypt (Global Partnership for Education, 2024). The Center for Global Affairs released a policy paper concerning the problems of public education in Egypt September 2022: ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 24 of 94  When confronted with the spiral of issues our contemporary society faces, one cannot overlook the adverse effects that poor education has on our population. In all simplification, poor education is the root and underlying cause behind all the major problems societies are enduring nowadays. It could range from overpopulation, child labor, poverty, gender inequality, all the way to conflicts, wars and climate change. These are all one way or another, a consequence of lack of education. According to global competitiveness indicators issued by the World Economic Forum, Egypt ranks 134 out of 144 economies with respect to its quality of primary education (Ille & Peacey, 2019). A number that only indicates a curtailing youth population, growing poverty rates and an obscure prospect for economic development. It is safe to say that the public sector of education in Egypt is a disaster. In an environment of low-quality education, private tutoring is widespread. The system is plagued by corruption, unprofessional teachers, an underfunded education system, overcrowded classrooms, poor facilities, and lastly, a redundant curriculum. Education has always been a right enshrined in the Egyptian constitution, and its most recent iteration in Article 19 of the 2014 Constitution is one that offers more legal guarantees promising to raise the level of education and ensure free education to all (Nassar, 2019). Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that only 4% of government budget is spent on education (World Bank, 2020), and areas deprived of education have increased by 6.5% in the countryside and its outskirts in the past decade. This is a glimpse of how big of a challenge Egypt is facings, especially considering the sector’s already existing and longstanding problems. This paper aims to address the issues faced by public education institutions in Egypt, as well as to underscore the government’s efforts in dealing with these challenges, with the purpose of outlining further solutions to support education in Egypt. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 25 of 94  1. Overpopulated classrooms With a rising youth population and scarce resources, public education in Egypt struggles a big deal with high poverty rates, which preclude a majority of the population from seeking private education. The average number of students in a public classroom is 45 students, while every year an additional 500,000 to 700,000 students enroll in public schools (El-Tamimi&co, 2020). The rapid population growth has placed strains on Egypt’s education system, which supports over 21 million students in 50,000 schools (Moustafa, et al. 2022). Aside from lack of funding and resources, this is mostly caused by an infrastructure problem that impedes the creation of sufficient school capacity. There are 55,000 schools across the country, yet, far more schools are still required to meet the challenges of overcrowded classrooms. Some classrooms in public schools are overcrowded to the extent that students cannot find desks, with no strict restrictions on the number of students per class. This does not only hinder the quality of education delivered to the future generations, but also creates a dynamic of educational inequality, generating an interdependency on private tutoring, which is another problematic issue faced by the sector. The problem is worsened when it comes to higher education, as only 31% of students are enrolled in universities (Leila, 2020). 2. Quality of education A natural result of overcrowded classrooms and underfunded education is a substantial reduction in the quality of education. Student density in classrooms rose during the last five years for all public pre-university education, at the rate of 5.11% between the school years 2015-2016 and 2019-2020 (Ille. & Peacey, 2018). Meanwhile, the relative increase in private education is stable, reaching only 3% during the same period. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 26 of 94 Additionally, the public curricula, under Thanaweya Amma, comprises an educational methodology that solely relies on reverberation and repetition. It is not structured to stimulate critical thinking, problem solving nor does it develop the upcoming generations’ interpersonal skills, making them unprepared for higher education and later on, unqualified for the job market. This is exemplified by the fact that 35% of higher education graduates are unemployed (El-Masry, 2013). Egypt is ranked 141st in terms of quality of basic education (UNICEF, 2020), with only Cairo University, ranked number 392, as one of the best global universities. Even though some schools took on a different approach on how tests are given, by introducing more variety into classroom material through interactive learning, children are still required to answer questions solely based on the textbooks as they are the only answers teachers recognize. Nevertheless, this problem is further exacerbated by a lack of qualified and well- equipped teachers, due to a lack of training and meagre wages. Additionally, another major obstacle to public schools lies not only in how traditional the teaching and learning methodology is, but most importantly, in the scarcity of extracurricular activities. These activities offer students the opportunity apply academic skills in a real-world context, and thus, provide a channel for reinforcing the lessons learned in the classroom. 3. Corruption Corruption in public education is endemic in Egypt. It is not confined to corrupt administrations or misallocated resources, and those who are least complicit in corruption, the students, are the worst affected by it (El-Masry, 2013). Students enrolled in public schools in Egypt suffer from extortion, nepotism, bribes and sexual harassment, which unswervingly generates a toxic learning environment. Private tutoring and underpaid teachers compose an ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 27 of 94 endless and vicious cycle perpetuating corruption in all governorates’ educational institutions, to the point that it has taken it out of the hands of state control, as private tutoring is now considered to be a social norm. The irony and the vicious cycle lie in the promotion of free education, yet, creating an interdependent and coerced dynamic that hinders students from passing without offering financial benefits to their underpaid teachers. The cost of private tutoring is a physical and psychological burden on low- income Egyptian families, where free education is supposedly a right enshrined in the constitution. This has allowed teachers to take advantage of the failed system and thus prevented the implementation of possible improvements. 4. Lack of funds and investment in education By global standards, total spending on primary, secondary and higher education as a percentage of total government expenditure averages 11%, ranging from 7% to 17%, differing from one country to another (Eurostat, 2020). On the other hand, Egypt’s spending on education accounts for only 4% of GNP (Nassar, 2019), which is less than half of the amount the government promised. Moreover, the 2014 constitution stipulates that the government must allocate 6% of GNP to education, broken down into 4% for primary and secondary education, and 2% to higher education (Oxford Business Group, 2021). Even when investments occur, they are not allocated in the right places. It is important to highlight that the education minister invested 9 billion EGP in buying tablets for students in the first stage of high school, whereas only 12 billion EGP were allocated for building new schools and classrooms, out of a total budget of 56 billion EGP. These tablets account for 16% of total education budget, although education experts warned that more than 60% of schools were not prepared to adapt to this technological transition. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 28 of 94 Some of these schools, mainly rural ones, lacked decent internet infrastructure. The parliament then proceeded with asking the government to reconsider the decision and to firstly invest in upgrading the infrastructure before having students shift to using tablets. Furthermore, the education ministry estimates that this year, the system will have a shortfall of 200,000 to 300,000 teachers and of more than 28,000 classrooms. The teacher shortage became so acute that the minister came up with the idea of having unemployed teachers and university graduates volunteer to teach. Each volunteering teacher will be paid 20 EGP per hour, that way, the government can avoid having to hire more teachers at a regular salary with conditions and benefits (El-Masry, 2013). GOVERNMENT EFFORTS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS Egypt has been prioritizing education within its national strategy, with goals to be achieved by 2030. In terms of basic education, the government is seeking to develop existing schools as well as establish new ones inspired by the Japanese education system. As part of the reform, the World Bank has dedicated $100 million towards increasing access to pre-primary school while simultaneously improving the quality of education (Moustafa, et al. 2022) This entails reforms that focus on restructuring technical schools to turn them into technology-focused schools that provides modern and up to date education. The reforms’ strategic objectives include increasing access to pre-primary education, improving the quality of primary and secondary education to align with international standards, as well as to advance the country’s ranking internationally. Constrained with limited resources and awaiting the gradual increase in the fiscal budget pledged in the 2014 constitution, the strategy of the ministry of education is to implement reforms gradually to fully transform the education ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 29 of 94 system by 2030. Furthermore, at the primary level, the access and infrastructure objectives are focused on contending with overcrowding and lack of resources in Egypt’s public schools. New education tools are proposed to assist with this endeavor, especially digital technology, which is promoted as a method of modernizing the curriculum. Although government reformative efforts are recognized, it is important to tackle the obstacles that have been deeply-rooted within the system, instead of introducing new educational tools students are not familiar with. For instance, it is of utmost importance to develop critical thinking skills and implement interpersonal skills within the curriculums rather than finding technology-based techniques to counter the sector’s impediments. This is for two binding reasons, firstly, due to the scarcity of resources and secondly, because there are greater priorities, such as investing in teaching professionals. The government is advised to provide different outlooks when dealing with the shortcoming of education in Egypt. However, it is crucial to underpin that whilst the lack of investment in education persists, the reformative efforts will not come to life. That being said, further funding efforts are critical to the success of public education in Egypt. Nonetheless, without an efficient and concise roadmap tackling corruption, poor quality of education, underpaid teachers and overpopulated classrooms, investment in education would have a null result. Instead of further institutionalizing the private sector, the government should work on abolishing educational inequality by ensuring equal educational opportunities. The system should focus on developing a self-reliant student and individual of society, capable of analytical thinking. Confidence in the public educational system should be revived, by raising the quality of education and setting standards for the skills and programs inflicted by the system. An enhanced system of monitoring and evaluation shall be placed to limit the corrupt nature of the educational system, eliminating ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 30 of 94 private tutoring and evaluating teachers’ performance. It goes without saying that further budgetary efforts on behalf of the state could save the sector from collapsing. Increasing teachers’ wages and investing in their training workshops could definitely go a long way in perpetuating a better, more cultivated society. Improving the quality of education is the number one factor that requires immediate attention. References Sebastian Ille, Mike W. Peacey, Forced private tutoring in Egypt: Moving away from a corrupt social norm, International Journal of Educational Development, 2019 “Education.” UNICEF Egypt, 2020 www.unicef.org/egypt/education Sami Nassar. “Studies in Human Rights.” The Right to Education in Egypt, hrightsstudies.sis.gov.eg/studies-reports/studies/the-right-to- education-in-egypt/. World Bank. “Government Expenditure on Education, Total (% of GDP) - Egypt, Arab Rep.” Data, data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS?locations=EG. Reem Leila. “Private Universities in Egypt: Joining the Trend - Egypt - Al-Ahram Weekly.” Ahram Online, Nov. 2020, english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentP/50/389915/AlAhram-Weekly/Private- univers ities-in-Egypt-Joining-the-trend-.aspx. El-Masry, Salah. Where Corruption Thrives: Public Universities in Egypt - Daily News Egypt. Feb. 2013, dailynewsegypt.com/2013/02/13/where- corruption-thrives-public-universities-in-e gypt/. Eurostat. “Educational Expenditure Statistics.” Eurostat, 2020, ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics- explained/index.php?title=Educational_expenditure_statistics. IMMGRANTS, REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS EDUCATION The Arab Republic of Egypt* is increasingly becoming a destination country for many refugees and asylum seekers arriving from across the middle east and east Africa. Egypt has a comprehensive legal framework, providing for the inclusion of migrants, including refugees and asylum * https://www.unhcr.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/sites/36/2024/08/UNHCR-Egypt-Factsheet_AUG-2024.pdf ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 31 of 94 seekers, in national services including education and healthcare, and in the labor market. As of August 2024, there were 737,000 refugees and asylum- seekers registered with UNHCR in Egypt, more than double the number from a year ago with major conflicts across its borders. Refugees in Egypt live in urban settings across the major cities, with most new arrivals coming from Sudan. Since the onset of the conflict in Sudan, UNHCR has observed a sevenfold increase in Sudanese individuals registering as refugees, mainly women and children. With needs growing exponentially, resources are running thin for the GoE, UN agencies and other strategic partners to provide refugee and host community children with safe, protective quality learning spaces. In December 2023, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) announced a US$2 million First emergency response grant in Egypt. The 12-month grant, implemented by UNHCR in partnership with UNICEF, is reaching over 20,000 Sudanese refugees in the Aswan, Cairo, Giza and Alexandria Governorates. Interventions supported by the grant include non-formal education, cash grants, social cohesion with host communities, mental health and psychosocial support, and construction and refurbishment work in public schools hosting refugee children to benefit both refugee and host community children. In the same line, In 2023, the EU** allocated €5 million in humanitarian aid to help the most vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers in Egypt. EU humanitarian funding covers 2 main sectors: education in emergencies and basic needs. The EU also funds activities to improve access to formal and non-formal ** https://civil-protection-humanitarian-aid.ec.europa.eu/where/middle-east-and-northern-africa/egypt_en ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 32 of 94 education for refugee children, focusing on primary and secondary school levels in both public and refugee community schools. An EU-funded learning recovery program has equipped refugee teachers with tools to identify learning gaps and better develop students’ foundational skills in the classroom. Also, UNHCR advocates for enrolling refugees and asylum- seekers in public schools on the same footing as Egyptians. In 2023, UNHCR provided education cash grants to more than 73,000 children to support the enrolment of refugee students in public schools and refugee community learning centres and enable their access to safe transportation to school and buy needed stationery. Furthermore, based on the needs identified by the GoE, UNHCR provides teacher training, supports the refurbishment of schools, and supplies equipment, computers, furniture, and other necessities to assist the Egyptian facilities in absorbing the refugee population. Egypt*** hosts a predominantly young and a highly diverse refugee population in need of adequate education services at all levels. Moreover, those refugees who can access public education often face difficulties, as do Egyptian children, in terms of overcrowded classrooms, lack of educational materials, issues over the quality of education and reliance on private lessons to make up for gaps presented by the education system. In addition to overcrowded classrooms, many student migrants and refugees, asylum-seekers and host communities have poor educational support at home and few opportunities to access remedial and/or online education. The Arab Republic of Egypt ratified the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol in May *** https://www.gtai.de/resource/blob/916456/1402ef261df1217a58abbf2ce8bcd5ae/PRO20221102916402%20Anne x%20III.PDF ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 33 of 94 1981. Egypt is also a State Party to the 1969 OAU Convention governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. A 1954 Memorandum of Understanding with the Government of Egypt (GoE) accords UNHCR functional responsibilities for, inter alia, all aspects of registration, asylum documentation, refugee status determination. In 2019, the GoE announced the initiation of draft asylum law, which is expected to be adopted some time in 2024. According to text of 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees including inter alia: Article 3: Non-discrimination: The contracting states shall apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin. Article 22: Public education: The Contracting states shall accord to refugees the same treatment as is accorded to nationals with respect to elementary education. The Contracting States shall accord to refugees treatment as favorable as possible, and, in any event, not less favorable than that accorded to aliens generally in the same circumstances, with respect to education other than elementary education and, in particular, as regards access to studies, the recognition of foreign school certificates, diplomas and degrees, the remission of fees and charges and the award of scholarships. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the primary human rights instrument for children. It has been ratified or acceded to by 196 states. The obligation to prohibit all corporal punishment of children falls directly under articles 4, 19, 28, 29, and 37 of the Convention: Article 4 States Parties shall undertake all appropriate legislative, administrative, and other measures for the ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 34 of 94  implementation of the rights recognized in the present Convention. With regard to economic, social and cultural rights, States Parties shall undertake such measures to the maximum extent of their available resources and, where needed, within the framework of international co-operation. Article 19: 1. States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child. 2. Such protective measures should, as appropriate, include effective procedures for the establishment of social programs to provide necessary support for the child and for those who have the care of the child, as well as for other forms of prevention and for identification, reporting, referral, investigation, treatment and follow-up of instances of child maltreatment described heretofore, and, as appropriate, for judicial involvement. Article 28: 1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to education, and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall, in particular: (a) Make primary education compulsory and available free to all; (b) Encourage the development of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, make them available and accessible to every child, and take appropriate measures such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case of need; (c) Make higher education accessible to all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means; (d) Make educational and vocational information and guidance available and accessible to all children; (e) Take measures to encourage regular attendance at schools and the reduction of drop-out rates. 2. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 35 of 94  States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that school discipline is administered in a manner consistent with the child's human dignity and in conformity with the present Convention. 3. States Parties shall promote and encourage international cooperation in matters relating to education, in particular with a view to contributing to the elimination of ignorance and illiteracy 9 throughout the world and facilitating access to scientific and technical knowledge and modern teaching methods. In this regard, particular account shall be taken of the needs of developing countries. Article 29: 1. States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to: (a) The development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential; (b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations; (c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilizations different from his or her own; (d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin; (e) The development of respect for the natural environment. 2. No part of the present article or article 28 shall be construed so as to interfere with the liberty of individuals and bodies to establish and direct educational institutions, subject always to the observance of the principle set forth in paragraph 1 of the present article and to the requirements that the education given in such institutions shall conform to such minimum standards as may be laid down by the State. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 36 of 94  Article 37 States Parties shall ensure that: (a) No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age; (b) No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time; (c) Every child deprived of liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, and in a manner which takes into account the needs of persons of his or her age. In particular, every child deprived of liberty shall be separated from adults unless it is considered in the child's best interest not to do so and shall have the right to maintain contact with his or her family through correspondence and visits, save in exceptional circumstances; (d) Every child deprived of his or her liberty shall have the right to prompt access to legal and other appropriate assistance, as well as the right to challenge the legality of the deprivation of his or her liberty before a court or other competent, independent and impartial authority, and to a prompt decision on any such action. In addition, Articles 2, 3, 6 and 12 are regarded as the four general principles underlying implementation of the Convention, providing respectively for non-discrimination, the best interests of the child, the child’s right to life, survival and development, and respect for the views of the child. Egypt was among the first signatory countries on the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) in December 1989 and ratified it in 1990. It declared its first decade for the child protection 1989-1999. Child law was declared in 1996 and amended 2008 which is considered one of the accomplishments of the National ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 37 of 94 Council of Childhood and Motherhood and the declaration of the second decade welfare of the Egyptian child, 2000-2010. Thus, on the legislative level Egypt provides a body of laws to protect children. The Government of Egypt is committed to addressing the best interest of the child through fulfilling regular monitoring, reporting and implementation of the recommendations of the UNCRC Committee. Furthermore, since Egypt ratified CRC, concerned ministries started to regulate the laws and policies to maintain child rights. The MoETE issued a legal ban on using corporal punishment in schools and issued Positive Discipline regulation. Moreover, Egypt - at both governmental and non- governmental levels - has always been targeting the fulfilment of the requirements of the 3Ps which represent the core of CRC. There are continuous efforts supporting the Provision of free education for all - and even at higher education. Similar efforts are directed to child Protection through cutting down drop outs and providing shelter, education and/or vocational training to street children. In addition, a 24/7 call centres to deal with children- related emergencies and problems has become available. Also, educational reform that encourages adopting active learning strategies to facilitate child Participation is always advocated. For example, starting from this 2014, the ministry of education initiated the establishment of national think-tanks for all pre-university students. Furthermore, The 2014 Constitution has guaranteed child rights (Article 80). According to the Constitution, a child is any human being below the age of 18. Hence, a child, inclusive of those with disability, is accorded protection and preservation of rights; is entitled to obtain ID documents; receives free-of-charge and mandatory vaccination; is eligible to health care and family or foster family care, is provided by proper nutrition and safe shelter; ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 38 of 94 attains sound emotional and cognitive development and has access to education. Furthermore, a child shall not be subjected to any form of violence or abuse, improper treatment and sexual and commercial exploitation. Children victims shall be provided by a specific judiciary system. In the same vein, the Constitution has introduced Article 214 promulgating establishing independent national councils such as the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood with technical, financial and administrative autonomy. The National Council for Childhood can report any violation directly to public authorities. As part of the goodwill endeavor to children, the government has, in collaboration with the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood and civil society organizations, launched a national strategy for motherhood and childhood for 2017- 2023. Such strategy aims at implementing childhood and motherhood rights from a comprehensive developmental perspective; providing better services to promote Egyptian children and families’ rights; prioritizing actions in relation to motherhood and childhood in the years to follow; and shedding limelight on child health, survival, growth, development, education, protection and engagement in public spheres. The strategy has further paid heed to children of poor families in Upper Egypt and rural areas in the provision of basic services on a level playing field. In 2016, Egypt launched its first version of the Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt’s Vision 2030, as a cornerstone for a comprehensive developmental process. The national Vision considered national priorities and aspirations to draw a roadmap that achieves sustainable development, meets Egyptian people’s dreams and aspirations for a decent and dignified life, and maximizes the benefits from all of the country’s potential and capabilities. Egypt’s Vision 2030 has provided a clear direction for the country’s efforts to achieve sustainable development across its ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 39 of 94 economic, social, and environmental dimensions. It has also informed the government’s plans and programs, with a clear focus on inclusive and sustainable growth, as well as balanced government’s development. Egypt’s Vision 2030 aims for the state to adopt a participatory approach to address regional and international challenges, where Egypt’s role is anchored in proposing new initiatives and ideas, as well as contributing to the consolidation of efforts towards achieving shared developmental interests for all, Egypt’s Vision 2030 aims for collaboration between all development partners, to ensure concerted and consistent efforts and avoid duplication by adopting a participatory approach, in order to achieve sustainable development more efficiently and expeditiously. Also, Egypt’s Vision 2030 aims to enhance the quality of education and expand access to quality education for everyone, with no discrimination. It emphasizes fostering creativity and innovation by integrating technology as a fundamental component of education. This ultimately leads to the development of Egypt’s human capital; with a special focus on children and youth, empowering them to excel in various fields of the labor market. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 40 of 94  UNIT 3 TOLERANCE AND ACCEPTANCE ISSUE TOLERANCE The word ‘’tolerance” comes from Latin “tolerate”, which means “to bear, to suffer. Psychologists claim that ‘tolerance means respecting other people’s beliefs or ways of living’. Tolerance is a term used to describe other people’s attitudes and behaviors which may be disapproved consciously or unconsciously or treated by us as abnormal, nevertheless we try to respect them. Tolerance should be put together with patience and kindness and never with anger, scorn or indifference. WHAT IS TOLERANCE? means accepting and valuing differences between people, appreciating that differences enrich us. It recognizes that each of us has a limited perspective on the world and that together our tapestry of insights and virtues is greater than those of any one person, tribe or culture alone. is the appreciation of diversity and the ability to live and let others live. is not just agreeing with one another or remaining indifferent in the face of injustice, but rather showing respect for the essential humanity in every person. is the failure to appreciate and respect the practices, opinions and beliefs of another group. TYPES OF TOLERANCE community tolerance. religion tolerance. national tolerance. personal tolerance. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 41 of 94  IMPORTANCE OF TOLERANCE promotes acceptance and understanding of others, allows us to work and live together in a harmony, creates a more respectful society, build strong relationships with people around us. prevent discrimination. HOW IS TOLERANCE TREATED BY TEACHERS? Teachers at school should tolerate clothes or hair-cuts of their students but they mustn’t tolerate their wrong behavior towards other students or themselves, swearwords or any other form of intolerance. In order to make the school society work properly, there’s a need for mutual tolerance (between the students and teachers). It’s the only way to reach an agreement and avoid conflicts. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 42 of 94 Create a safe (inclusive) learning environment school should strive to create an environment that values diversity and inclusivity. By doing so, students can interact with individuals from different walks of life and learn from their experiences. Promoting Empathy The curriculum should teach students about different cultures, religions, and backgrounds. By doing so, students can understand the struggles and experiences of others, which can help them develop empathy and respect for others. Encourage critical thinking Teachers should facilitate discussions that promote critical thinking and encourage students to consider the perspectives of others. Teach about diversity Schools should provide students with opportunities to challenge their preconceptions about others. For example, through cultural exchange programs or guest speakers , students can interact with individuals from different cultures and learn about their experiences. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 43 of 94  UNDERSTANDING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TOLERANCE AND ACCEPTANCE tolerance can lead to tokenism, while acceptance leads to true diversity and inclusion. tolerance can be withdrawn, while acceptance is enduring. tolerance is conditional, while acceptance is unconditional. Tolerance is passive, while acceptance is active. FINALLY Mr. Mohamed Abdel Latif, Minister of Education and Technical Education, issued a ministerial decision No. 150 of 2024 regarding the regulations for educational incentives and school discipline in the pre-university education stage. The decision stipulates that the regulations shall ensure the organization of the rights and duties of students, parents, and the responsibilities and powers of school staff; with the aim of achieving self-discipline and educational guidance for students during the educational process. Discipline for students within the Egyptian school represents an important priority that should precede all other priorities of the educational process, as the school is the second nucleus in society after the family. In addition, interest in school activities helps develop students' skills and abilities, and develop teaching methods. The regulations aim to protect students and members of the teaching staff, so that each of them can perform their role, responsibilities, and duties to the fullest extent, as well as motivate them to advance the educational and pedagogical process, by preparing and providing the appropriate educational and pedagogical environment; To achieve the goals of the educational and teaching process, and contribute to enhancing and creating a safe school environment, in order to spread positive behaviors by motivating them to do and behave, through the following: Enhancing positive behaviors, and reducing student problems. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 44 of 94  Providing educational methods to deal with student behaviors, according to educational, preventive and therapeutic guidance foundations to modify behavior. Using scientific methods to solve student problems, and avoiding using any forms of abuse. Providing a safe school environment free of violence, enabling students, school administration, and teachers to perform their roles to the fullest extent, and pushing towards school effectiveness. Introducing students and parents to the school's educational systems and instructions, and the importance of adhering to them. Students' commitment to the school's instructions and systems to achieve student discipline. Helping students realize their needs and tendencies, and helping them reach acceptable positive behavior. Developing and instilling the value of belonging and loyalty to the homeland, society, and school. Providing a safe and supportive school environment that helps students achieve proper social, academic growth and helps them build positive relationships based on mutual respect with others. Promoting positive behaviors and reducing negative behaviors that expose the student to taking remedial measures. Strengthening the values of tolerance and mutual respect between school administration, teachers, and students. Achieving effective school discipline for all educational levels, and familiarizing students and their parents with the guidelines and instructions related to behavior and order, and the importance of adhering to them. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 45 of 94  Providing a framework that regulates the duties and rights of students, in a way that enhances the sense of responsibility and belonging to the school. Respecting the rights and duties of all those involved in the educational process. Reducing the spread of behavioral problems that students and teachers are exposed to in schools. Providing opportunities for students to participate constructively and have the right to express their opinions through available social and educational activities. Everyone must apply the provisions of this regulation properly, without arbitrariness or favoritism, and in the interest of the regularity and discipline of school work, with the professional awareness, educational thought, religious and national dimension available to it; to eliminate unwanted behaviors. The regulation is based on the Education Law, the Child Law, the guidelines and instructions issued by the Ministry of Education and Technical Education, as well as the educational foundations and rules based on sound scientific foundations, applied in all countries of the world, which guarantee the student the right to protection, and the right to learn in a safe and stimulating environment, away from fear and intimidation. The teacher has the right to work in safe conditions, which impose legal obligations on the student that he must adhere to, and in the event of violation, treatments or penalties are taken against his improper behavior. The decision stipulates that the School Protection Committee shall be responsible for studying, analyzing and investigating the causes of complaints and behavioral problems that are brought to it by school students, their parents, or ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 46 of 94 employees, related to violations that require remedial measures, and taking the necessary measures to solve the problems brought to it at the school, and applying the penalties and means of dealing with the violations mentioned in these regulations, in addition to coordinating with the School Social Service Office in the Education Administration; To take appropriate measures, as well as prepare a special file for the school called the school discipline file, which includes a list of all cases, and all measures taken to confront all forms of violations, as well as the programs and activities implemented to reduce them. A monthly report on the contents of the file is submitted to the sub-protection committee in the administration, provided that the committee meets at least once a month, or whenever necessary. The decision explained that behavioral violations are classified into four levels according to their degree, severity, and the impact of their commission on the student, the educational environment, and society in general. The procedures for each of them are implemented according to the provisions of these regulations, provided that each of them is documented, in accordance with the approved systems and models, and dealt with in accordance with educational values and systems. ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Page 47 of 94  UNIT 4 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ISSUE INTRODUCTION Violence against women is a term used to collectively refer to violent acts that are primarily or exclusively committed against women. The United Nations General Assembly defines “violence against women” as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental or harm or suffering to women,