Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Shanghai

Education:

When the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932, education was not accessible to everyone and limited to individualized instruction at religious schools in mosques in urban areas. These schools taught Islamic law and basic literacy skills. By the end of the century, Saudi Arabia had a nationwide educational system providing free training from preschool through university to all citizens.

The primary education system began in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. By 1945, King Abdulaziz bin Abdelrahman Al-Saud, the country's founder, had initiated an extensive program to establish schools in the Kingdom. Six years later, in 1951, the country had 226 schools with 29,887 students. In 1954, the Ministry of Education was established, headed by then Prince Fahd bin Abdulaziz as the first Minister of Education. The first university, now known as King Saud University, was founded in Riyadh in 1957.

Today, Saudi Arabia's nationwide public educational system comprises twenty eight (28) universities, more than 24,000 schools, and a large number of colleges and other educational and training institutions. The system provides students with free education, books and health services and is open to every Saudi. Over 25 percent of the annual State budget is for education including vocational training. The Kingdom has also worked on scholarship programs to send students overseas to the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Japan, Malaysia and other nations. Currently thousands of students are being sent to higher-educations programs every year.

Health Care:

The health care technology is continuously modernized in KSA. The Kingdom has its own facilities to trained physicians, nurses, and others of work force working in the field of medical care, these services extended to include remote areas in the Kingdom. During the last few years, the private sector started to have active role in the health care service, as it runs number of highly and successfully hospitals and clinics.

The main hospitals service all type of sophisticated treatment to include open heart surgery, kidney transplant, and cancer treatment, as well as the Kingdom possesses one of the biggest qualified eye hospitals in the world. While for the health care insurance program in the Kingdom, it is available with a reasonable cost. For more information, please visit the Ministry of Health.

Saudi Youth:

Young people represent the real wealth of the kingdom, where they represent more than 60% of the population, at the same time they need a lot of efforts to pave the way right in front of them and provide appropriate opportunities to assume different positions of work and responsibilities.

Therefore, the General Presidency for Youth Welfare take cares of different cultural aspects in all sectors of creative intellectual, literary, cultural and artistic, as well as social aspects, in order to integrate young people in community service.

In the cultural field, it established literary clubs, now numbering in the Kingdom of nearly 15 clubs, and the Association of Culture and Arts and branches of the 13 branches. These cultural institutions are to take care of the talents of young artists and print production and organizing literary evenings to take their scripts and programming of their offspring technical and reassigned to attend out of country festivals and the publication of magazines specialized in arts and musical arts, photography, theater, and elite Saudi youth takes advantage of these cultural institutions. The rest are taken care of by 153 sport, cultural and social clubs scattered in all parts of Saudi Arabia, is in fact not competent to sports clubs, however, have the roles of social, cultural and artistic.

At the social level controlled by the Department of Social Affairs and camps in the presidency on the different events aimed at integrating young people in their community and hone the skills of social work and interact with the international occasions, and camps for the public service, and recreational camps, scout camps and environment protection camps, in addition to national and international trips.

It should also be noted that the presidency oversees the Saudi Arabian Society for Youth Hostels, formed by the Presidency and have opened more than two dozen houses in various parts of Saudi Arabia, and the number of beneficiaries of nearly two hundred thousand young people, as a venue for cultural and sports activities, and contains scientific centers for the development of skills of young people in design and invention.

Saudi Women in Society:

There's no doubt that Saudi woman has an important role in building her society which means that she looks for wider horizons in terms of development, a matter that leads to strengthen her existed national pioneer role which she is capable to practice nowadays, or facing serious problems and real crisis, but she had developed awareness – thanks to Al Mighty – to commit to the contents which assure her distinguished legislative & national personality, which makes her away from the non-positive requests, adding the ones which threaten its distinguish in values and personality.

Reaching this level of awareness creates a vision that keeps her looking forward for more opportunities of sharing in the society development mainly in the feminine fields; also this awareness makes her stronger and tough in asking for her different rights as well in facing her various problems & crisis.

These women issues and problems start correcting the traditional ways which the society thinks of the woman's entity, i.e. correcting the view's two contradicted opposite parts: excessiveness & negligence, so there is a precious view exceeded the legislation till she thought equality with man in rights & duties, deletion of all kinds of distinction (not discrimination), there are unenlightened views from woman still existed in her mind, its not only the offensive behavior against her or those expressed by inclusive and exclusive expressions of insulting her, but also including the inner situations of negative attitude towards her, which are reflected by wasting her rights.

Since women’s issues are mainly starting with view correctness, it is passing through widening her own interaction fields with the society whether within the frame work of education, work or in giving her the freedom to practice her hobbies, with keeping her privacy which considered as a strict condition in her interaction, her issues will not end except by understanding that her rights and gains are legislative, defined and restricted.

The Saudi woman sharing in building, developing her country is not new. Today, there are huge efforts for her sharing in work field and in various fields.

Woman is the reason of hindering herself, since she is responsible for her future, her career in different fields of work, today the woman is a teacher, a physician and a businesswoman but within the social traditions, Islamic religion customs, with conformity to the teachings of our religion. Some are criticizing the Saudi woman for wearing the gown, as they thought that wearing this modest decent dress equals between people and considered as a symbol for their faith in God.