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Endowment symposium 
at Zayed 
University

DUBAI - Zayed University will host its first Endowment and Education Symposium under the title of ‘historical and contemporary models of the East and West’ on March 27, in collaboration with the Secretariat Of Awqaf in Kuwait and the Islamic Development Bank, at it Dubai Campus.

Dr Sulaiman Al Jassim, Vice-President of Zayed University, praised the initiatives of His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, for sponsoring the symposium that will discuss the role of endowment in the development of education.

“The conference aims to achieve sustainable development in today’s societies through access to real-life knowledge shared by researchers. During a situation of economic crisis and limited ability to fund education, the world is left to rely on endowments to ensure continuation of educational programmes. In fact, endowments set up in the US universities and many other countries have shown progressive results,” Al Jassim said.

“This project is considered one of the main goals of the university as it seeks to pursue community engagement in developing education to support research. Waqf was known to be one of the main charity works done in Muslim communities, however western universities adopted the idea of Waqf and applied it,” Al Jassim added.

Al Jassim highlighted the case of Harvard University as an example.

“The university allocated about $40 billion based on a survey conducted last year followed by Yale University and Stanford University. The tendency of the community taking part in this social responsibility doesn’t diminish the role of the government in the state-sponsored university education, but society’s contribution in this matter make all partners in the responsibility for higher education, development and provision of resources to help universities in the modernisation of its academic activities and research.

Zayed University established its first endowed chain for Dh10 million to fund academic programmes specialised in public health by Bin Hamoodah Group.

Dr Nasr Arif, Director of the Islamic World Studies Institute in Zayed University said the participants in the international symposium would include academics from Harvard University, Oxford University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Durham University and a number of other universities from the Arab world.

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