Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62913
Last September, Herbert Davis, higher education component director of the USAID Iraq Financial Development Project, conveyed a report on finance and banking education and AACSB International to His Excellency Ali Al-Adeeb, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research. From left to right, E. Sultan, deputy higher education component director of the Iraq Financial Development Project; Martin Dinning, former Chief of Party, Iraq Financial Development Project; Davis; H. E. Al-Adeeb; and Abdul Sahib, senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. higher education that is separate from, but parallel to, that of the rest of the country. According to recent estimates, Iraq has 59 public and private universities; 342,000 students attend public schools, and 41,000 attend private ones. Increasing the enrollment of women is a concern among the world's business programs. One of the first things we learned was that women currently comprise a large percentage of students enrolled in Iraq's universities. For example, women make up 30 percent of the enrollment at Al Mansour Univer- sity College in Baghdad. At Bagh- dad University, about 49 percent of students are women. Also, just recently, a woman, S. Mansour, was appointed as the dean of the Col- lege of Management and Economics at Baghdad's Al Mustansiriya Uni- versity. Additionally, women hold other administrative appointments in the colleges as directors of pro- grams or department chairs. I quickly discovered that it would be physically and financially impossible, given our timeline and budget, to do a comprehen- sive assessment of the quality and availability of finance and busi- ness education throughout Iraq. Therefore, with the concurrence of USAID, our small project team was able to tailor our work to focus on undergraduate finance and banking education, which was consistent with the purpose of the Iraq Finan- cial Development Project. I consid- ered that a good first step toward strengthening the emerging private banking system in the country. From Thought to Action Shortly after arriving, I was invited to meet with Mosa Aziz Al-Mosawa, the president of the University of Baghdad. The meet- ing was an eye-opener. I learned just how much Al-Mosawa was interested in learning about profes- sional accreditation for the univer- sity's College of Management and Economics. In fact, nearly every president and dean I met immedi- ately understood the importance of accreditation for their schools. They just didn't know what they would need to do to accomplish that goal. Adib Al-Ajeeli, the former Min- ister of Higher Education, also invited me to dinner with the key officials of the Ministry to discuss accreditation. The Minister, who had taught in other Middle Eastern countries and was familiar with the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), wanted to know about equivalent profes- sional accreditation for Iraq's col- leges of management and econom- ics. He then asked me to organize an accreditation workshop at the Ministry for close to 40 deans of Iraq's colleges of management and economics—and he wanted it done in three days. That was the point where my perception of my mission in Iraq changed. Why shouldn't Iraqi schools begin their pursuit of pro- fessional accreditation by focusing on the standards of the AACSB? If we were going to help strengthen business and finance education in Iraq essentially from the ground up, why not start with pursuing AACSB membership—and, eventu- ally, accreditation? I contacted Jerry Trapnell, executive vice president and chief accreditation officer at AACSB International, to inquire if the organization would be inter- ested in assisting us. I fully expected to be told that our goal was unreal- istic. I was surprised when Trapnell replied that he was prepared to help however he could. Trapnell then prepared a Webinar for use in Iraq, including workshop materials that were translated into Arabic. We held two workshops on accreditation for the deans, senior faculty, and senior officials of the Ministry of Higher Education. The first workshop introduced partici- pants to institutional accreditation and how it works in the United States. The second introduced them to professional accreditation by discipline and to AACSB specif- ically. A few months later, we held a second full-day program for the same attendees to explain in detail BizEd May/June 2012 39