- The UAE is an innovative social investor, seeking ways to expand opportunities for UAE citizens and help address regional and global challenges.
- Among top UAE priorities are educational reform, improving healthcare, expanding the role of women, and preserving the environment.
- The UAE has found a partner and ally in the United States to accomplish these domestic goals. Education In 1975, the rate of adult literacy was 54 percent among men and 31 percent among women. Today, literacy rates for both genders are nearly 95 percent.
- The UAE’s values of tolerance and openness are best reflected in the progress of Emirati women in education. Less than forty years ago, few women attended school but His Highness Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founder of the UAE, personally spearheaded movements to provide education to all women.
- Today, more Emirati women complete secondary education and enroll in university and post-graduate institutions than men. New initiatives have been launched across all educational levels with US partners playing a key role.
- New York University-Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and sciences campus with a robust research component to be operated abroad by a major US university. The New England Center for Children, a Massachusetts school serving children with autism, will establish a comprehensive special education program as well as train and qualify a number of UAE nationals to provide services in Arabic.
- MIT is helping develop the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi. The Institute, which focuses on clean energy technologies, will be the region’s first institution dedicated to research-driven graduate programs.
- The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has partnered with Dubai World to create the Dubai Leaders Program.
- Rochester Institute of Technology has established a new Dubai campus. Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health is helping to establish a public health doctoral program in the Emirates.
- The Emirates Leadership Initiative, a partnership between the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the UAE, promotes educational exchanges between the UAE and US and helps train and empower emerging leaders and public officials across the UAE and the Middle East.
- The Shamsa bent Mohammed Al Nahyan fellowship, held in collaboration with Yale University, challenges young professionals in education and health to devise a unique project in their field.
