In this activity, we will use the first Arab Human Development Report to examine not only the levels and measures of development in the Arab countries of the Middle East, but also to examine the act of measuring itself.

Small Group Activity, 25 minutes

The goal of the Arab Human Development Reports is to measure "development in all its dimensions: economic, social, civil, political and cultural." In your groups, you will examine and compare the various indices that the compilers of the report chose to measure. As you read the Report, think about the process of compiling the data. What measures did the demographers take? Why those? Who compiled the data, and with what objectives? Are these the demographic figures you would use to measure development? What might the obstacles be to collecting data such as this? Do you feel the measurements are culturally bounded or universal?

Process

Access the United Nations Development Programme's Arab Human Development Report 2002 Executive Summary at http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/contents/2002/execsum-02e.pdf. [You can also access the full report at http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/other/ahdr/ahdr2002e.pdf. If you use the full report, you may want to focus on the Overview (pp. 1-13); Chapter 2: The State of Human Development in the Arab Region; and the report's statistical summaries at the end.]

With your group members, look at the various statistics and measurements given in the summary of the report, and prepare to report out the following to the whole group:

• What do your group feel are the three most important measurements given for determining the level of development of a country/region? Why these?
• What are two measurements that your group feels are missing that would add the most to your ability to measure the level of development of a country/region? Why these?
• If you were to visually "map" out the elements of development measured in this report, how might you do it? What might you learn from such an exercise? What choices would you have to make? Feel free to create a mock-up of your mapping or visual design to demonstrate your points.
• If you were a member of the political elite of an Arab country reading this report, what two issues would you see as most critical to address first? What kinds of initiatives would you lay out in order to redress them?
• Looking at the measurements and the executive summary's analysis of these measurements, can you discern a particular agenda or worldview of the authors? How were the results of the AHDR "spun," and how were they critiqued? You might wish to read Rami Khoury's critique of the AHDR.

Discussion/Further Activities

Why do you think this report measured the development of the Arab countries rather than the Middle East as a whole? How do you think Turkey, Israel and Iran, for example, would compare to the statistics on the Arab world? Where might you find comparable statistics for these countries?