World's largest women university in Saudi gets wider interest
RIYADH- Saudi Arabia’s recently opened Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University gets world-wide attention.
The world’s largest women’s university, is located on the outskirts of the Saudi capital of Riyadh and has the capacity for 55,000 students to study subjects including business and science. It also has its own teaching hospital, laboratories and libraries.
The SR20-billion will boost women’s higher education in the Kingdom, said Huda Al-Ameel, the newly appointed PNU president.
“The new campus, covering eight million square meters, is considered the largest women-only university in the world,” said Al-Ameel in a statement.
Apart from administrative buildings, the new campus includes a 700-bed university hospital, 15 colleges, a central library, a conference hall, laboratories and three research centers for nanotechnology, information technology and biosciences. It also comprises staff housing units, student hostels, primary, intermediate and secondary schools and recreational facilities.
Firdous Al-Saleh, vice president for higher studies and scientific studies, said the university’s library has six million titles including important reference books. “King Abdullah has been closely following the campus project work,” said Walid Al-Mehwas, another vice president.
At present there are more than 28,000 students and about 3,000 staff members. There are colleges for medicine, dentistry, nursing, information technology, kindergarten education, languages, instant translation and pharmacy. It has 32 affiliated colleges in 17 cities and townships in the Riyadh province.
It is also planned to be a car-free environment, operating a shuttle monorail train and electric buggies for internal transport, while solar panels stretched on the campus will reportedly generate 18 percent of the power needed for air-conditioning.
However, British daily the Guardian observes asks how many of those women who graduate will actually be able to work and use the skills they’ve learned, given that Saudi Arabia has the world’ strictest sex-segregation rules? Currently women, many of whom are well-educated, comprise only 15% of the workforce. The 2010 World Economic Forum global gender gap report in 2010 ranked Saudi Arabia 129 out of 134 countries and gave the country a zero for female political empowerment.
Currently women cannot vote, must live under the control of a male guardian, usually a father or husband; they cannot get a job, travel or open a bank account with their guardian’s authority. They also cannot leave the house unattended or without wearing the niqab and cannot drive.
The Guardian quotes Nadya Khalife, from Human Rights Watch, about the new Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University:
“Ensuring women’s rights in Saudi Arabia is not about opening larger universities, it’s really about ensuring that women are allowed to study all fields and to be able to find future employment in these fields,” says Khalife. “The way in which Saudi Arabia segregates men and women in employment makes it very difficult for women to enter certain jobs. The Saudi government made promises, for instance, about ensuring that female lawyers, who are allowed to work only in administrative jobs, take up court cases, but there still has been no decision. While the opening of a large university is an indication of Saudi’s interest in educating women, it has to do much more to lift restriction on women’s employment.”
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