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Social innovation for human development. An Arab region perspective

06/02/2003 By Nader Fergany

The concept of  “human development” maintains that “people are the true wealth of nations” and that human development is a “process of expanding people’s choices”. “Choices” is an expression of the more sophisticated concept of “entitlements” introduced by Amartya Sen2, as an expression of the people’s basic right to these “choices”. It stipulates that human being, simply for being human, have an inalienable right to decent living, body and soul.

People’s entitlements are, in principle, unlimited and grow rapidly with human progress. Yet at any level of development, the three main entitlements in the opinion of the Human Development Report are “to live a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to possess resources necessary for a decent life”. However, human development does not stop at that minimum but goes beyond to include other entitlements such as “political, economic and social freedoms, opportunities for production and creativity, enjoyment of liberty, self-fulfillment, and respect for human rights”.

Thus human development is not merely development of human resources but rather genuinely humane approach to comprehensive and integrated development of human beings and societal institutions. In particular, it is inadmissible within the philosophy of human development to raise the possibility of contradiction between democracy and human development as is sometimes stipulated with respect to “economic” development.

Respect for human rights and effective participation of the people in social and political activities are fundamental ingredients of the institutional context of human development. That freedom is the ultimate measure of development is incessantly gaining ground. It will also be argued later on that the link between knowledge acquisition and human development is unbreakable.

 

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Keywords

Middle East Middle East and North Africa

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Bio author: Nader Fergany

Nader Fergany, Director of the Almishkat Center for Research of Egypt, is the lead author of the Report on Arab Human Development 2002 of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He has a degree in Political Science from the Cairo University of Egypt, and a Ph D from the University of North Carolina in the US.