Forty years of government investment in education in the Middle East and North Africa has failed to deliver the skills needed for an increasingly competitive world, the World Bank argues in a report published this week.

The region lags behind Asia and Latin America in literacy and in average years of schooling above the age of 15, the report says. At the same time, investment has had some success, notably in the near-universal access to schooling and the closure of the gender gap in primary schools.