Rewiring the Future

Muhammad Gawish

Co-Founder & CEO at iSchool

Muhammad Gawish, an electrical and electronics engineer, studied entrepreneurship and business management at Kelley School of Business – Indiana University. Co-Founder & CEO of iSchool is the #1 online Ai & coding platform in MENA for students aged 6 to 18, offering 1:1 or 1:many live coding classes in artificial intelligence, data science, game development, UI, UX, and cybersecurity.

AI & EDUCATION — CHAPTER 2

Rewiring the Future

A region at a crossroads

MENA is home to one of the youngest populations in the world: 55% under 30, compared with 36% across OECD countries. This demographic can be a powerful engine of growth—or a mounting social pressure—depending on whether education keeps pace with a rapidly changing economy. The answer, for now, is partial. And partial is not enough.

Enrollment numbers across the region have improved substantially over the past two decades. Literacy rates have risen. Girls’ access to schooling has expanded in several countries. But underneath these headline figures lies a more complicated picture. According to the World Bank, more than 60 percent of children in MENA cannot read and understand an age-appropriate text by the age of ten—a condition the institution defines as “learning poverty.” Students may be in school, but what they are learning often fails to prepare them for what comes after. The problem is not access to classrooms. It is access to relevant knowledge.

The digital economy has made this gap more visible and more urgent. Artificial intelligence—both as a subject of study and as a tool reshaping labor markets—has raised the stakes significantly. A generation that reaches adulthood without basic digital literacy, let alone coding skills or AI fluency, will find itself structurally disadvantaged in ways that were simply not true a decade ago.

The geography of the gap

To understand what is happening in MENA education, it helps to think geographically and socioeconomically. The divide is not simply between countries but within them. Private urban schools in Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh, or Beirut frequently offer competitive curricula, internationally recognized certifications, and growing exposure to technology. Students in these settings are often connected to global networks and positioned to compete internationally.

But they are a minority. The majority of young people in the region attend public schools, many in rural or peri-urban areas where infrastructure investment has lagged significantly. For students in these settings—and for children in refugee communities, low-income households, or underserved regions—access to quality technology education is not merely imperfect. It is, in many cases, absent.

Purely technological solutions—deploying devices, installing broadband, licensing platform access—are necessary but not sufficient. The cultural and relational dimensions of learning cannot be engineered away.

The consequences of this divide are not abstract. They accumulate over years of schooling into structural disadvantages that are difficult to reverse. Teacher training, infrastructure, and digital connectivity are consistently identified in regional education assessments as the primary bottlenecks. The students most likely to miss out on the AI economy are precisely those who are already most economically vulnerable—a dynamic that risks deepening existing inequalities rather than resolving them.

How governments are responding

Several governments have recognized this challenge and moved to address it, though at varying speeds and with varying capacity.

The United Arab Emirates has been among the most proactive. Its National AI strategy, launched in October 2017, made the UAE the first country in the world to appoint a dedicated Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. The strategy targets the UAE’s transformation into a global AI leader by 2031, integrating AI across sectors including healthcare, transport, and education. Abu Dhabi has established the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a graduate-level research institution focused on building regional expertise. The pace of institutional development has been notable.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 has similarly identified digital transformation and education as strategic pillars. The ambition is clearly articulated: a post-oil economy in which human capital and innovation capacity matter more than resource extraction. Significant investments have followed in coding initiatives, technology literacy programs, and the reorientation of university curricula.

Egypt presents a different picture. With a population of around 107 million, it faces the full challenge of policy ambition meeting logistical reality, including budget constraints, geographic complexity, and variability in teacher readiness. The country has articulated strong commitments to digital education through initiatives like the $15M plan with South Korea (preparatory phase in 2026), AI curricula introduction in schools starting 2025-2026, and the Digital Egypt Cubs program for IT upskilling—yet execution at scale remains uneven, with less than 30% of public schools ICT-ready.

The pattern across the region is consistent: Policy ambition has outpaced institutional capacity to implement it. The regulatory environment has not yet caught up with the pace of technological change. And the machinery needed to translate national strategy into classroom practice is, in many countries, still being constructed.

Rethinking inclusion

For policymakers, perhaps the most consequential reframing to emerge is a more precise understanding of what inclusive education actually requires in a digital context. Inclusion, in this context, goes far beyond classroom attendance.

It demands affordability and digital access that functions even where connectivity is weak. It requires Arabic-first content and pedagogies grounded in how students in the region actually learn. It means confronting gender disparities in technology education directly, not treating them as cultural inevitabilities. And it requires pairing AI tools with human mentorship: Removing the human layer does not lower costs—it lowers outcomes.

This points toward a partnership model rather than a procurement one. Governments that approach EdTech as a product to be purchased will consistently underperform relative to those that approach it as an ecosystem to be cultivated—one in which technology providers, educators, families, and public institutions each play distinct and complementary roles.

This is a more demanding standard than most current policy frameworks apply. It suggests that purely technological solutions—deploying devices, installing broadband, licensing platform access—are necessary but not sufficient. The cultural and relational dimensions of learning cannot be engineered away. They must be designed from the outset.

The window ahead

Several converging trends make the next five years particularly significant for education in MENA. AI tutoring is moving from experimental to operational across a growing number of contexts. Coding is gaining recognition as a core literacy in an expanding number of national curricula. The pandemic, for all its devastation, accelerated institutional openness to hybrid and online learning models that had previously faced significant resistance—cultural, bureaucratic, and pedagogical.

Across the region, millions of young people are coming of age as the nature of work shifts beneath them. Digital fluency is no longer a niche skill; it is becoming part of the basic toolkit for employability. Those who gain access to strong digital education early will carry that advantage with them. Those who do not will find the distance harder to close each year.

The technology to bridge this gap largely exists. What varies is the institutional capacity to deploy it equitably. Teacher training, infrastructure investment in underserved areas, regulatory agility, and the political will to treat technology education as a public good rather than a private premium. MENA has the talent, the ambition, and the energy. What it needs now is the execution infrastructure to turn potential into parity—and to do it before another generation enters the workforce unprepared.

A Synergic Education with iSchool 

A practitioner’s lens

It is in this context that iSchool—a Cairo-founded EdTech platform focused on AI and coding education for students aged six to eighteen—has built its model. Founded on the observation that existing education systems were preparing students for an economy that was already disappearing, the platform has positioned itself as a scalable bridge across the region’s digital education gap.

The model operates across three channels: directly to families, through partnerships with private schools, and through contracts with government ministries and national education programs. This triangulation reflects a deliberate effort to reach students across the socioeconomic spectrum, rather than catering exclusively to those who can already afford premium education. The platform reports having graduated more than 131,000 students across more than 20 countries, with a curriculum spanning AI fundamentals, data science, game development, UI/UX design, and cybersecurity.

What actually changes

The outcomes most consistently reported from AI and coding education programs point toward shifts that go beyond technical skill acquisition. Students who complete these curricula demonstrate increased confidence, stronger problem-solving orientation, and what we observed as entrepreneurial thinking emerging at younger ages. These are not incidental outcomes. Cognitive flexibility, problem-solving disposition, and the capacity to work creatively with new tools are increasingly valuable as automation advances.

In a region where family structures are strong, where learning is culturally understood as a social activity, and where a student’s relationship with a trusted adult figure shapes engagement and retention, software alone does not change outcomes.

For the MENA region, that’s particularly relevant: Economies seeking to diversify away from hydrocarbon dependence need human capital that looks different from what traditional rote-learning education systems have produced. The question of what students learn—not just whether they attend school—sits at the center of the region’s development challenge.

The important implication of field experience is that these changes in students are observable across different income levels and geographies when access is genuinely provided. The learning gap is not primarily a function of student capacity, but it is a function of the infrastructure of access and the quality of instruction.

The human variable

One of the most significant findings to emerge from running a digital education platform in MENA is the degree to which technology-enabled learning depends on human relationships. An early assumption in the EdTech sector—that a well-designed platform would be sufficient to drive independent learning—proved incomplete.

In a region where family structures are strong, where learning is culturally understood as a social activity, and where a student’s relationship with a trusted adult figure shapes engagement and retention, software alone does not change outcomes. Community and mentorship matter more than the platform. This is not a failure of technology: It is a finding about the cultural architecture within which technology must operate—and it has significant implications for how digital education initiatives are designed.

The practical response has been a hybrid model: AI tools handle personalization, repetition, and adaptive feedback, while human tutors focus on motivation, emotional intelligence, cultural context, and ethical guidance. When it is framed that way, resistance—which is real, generational, and well-documented among educators across the region—tends to diminish.

When teachers receive proper training and see AI as something that reduces their burden rather than threatening their role, adoption follows.