The misconception of Human Development in Iraq!

Many Iraqis and other Arabic-speaking people mistakenly believe that human development is Motivation and-Self help books. This misperception is that the motivational practitioners called themselves human development specialists before the concept of human development was spoken in Arabic .

First, human development can be summed up as a set of actions and processes aimed at making the life of human society better. This includes reducing poverty and improving people’s living conditions, including a good education, a clean environment and sustainable natural energy sources.

The principle of human development was formulated in the 1980s by the economist Mahbub al-Haq. The United Nations issued its first report on the state of human development in 1990. From that time on, development began to play its role as the highest priority of the United Nations until it reached important stages of maturity. On the integration of human development into the third generation of human rights.

In the view of the Ufuq Orrganization that confusion in the concept of human development leads to a lot of delay and confusion in the adoption of concepts, and work to achieve .. So our organization conducted an individual effort and its own resources survy of 1148 people.

:The survy result

The survy covered 1,148 people, 54% of whom were aged 15-25 years and 34.2% were 25-35 years old-
65% of the participants have a university degree, 20% of them have a Certificate of Secondary Education, and 7%  .of the participants have a Master or Doctoral Degree

There are 10% of the respondents believe that human development is not a good thing, 31% are not sure, and 55% think it is a good thing

There are 25%
of the sample of the questionnaire believes that the scope of development is the individual only – this is based on understanding the development as a stimulating session only – while 58% believe that its scope is society

In a question about the definition of development, 14% believe it can be defined as a false science, and 38% believe it is psychologically motivated. This makes the proportion of those who misunderstand development 52% of respondents.

Seventeen percent of respondents said they understood human development through social networking sites, and only 3.5 percent said they understood it from official websites of organizations and institutions. Most of them said he got his understanding from a variety of sources.

As a part of its mission as a Human Development Organization, we believe that there is a lot of work have to be done, the most important of which is to have an Arabic campaign in parallel with promoting development in other languages ​​for clarify the misconception and  its work and why we must work on it.

We call upon all concerned bodies of government institutions, United Nations organizations, international and local organizations to work with Ufuq on this issue. We can say with regret that we may be the only organization to date that believes that this is a real problem affecting the community’s acceptance of development .