Riyadh Gov. Prince Faisal bin Bandar. (SPA)

Riyadh Gov. Prince Faisal bin Bandar inaugurated here Wednesday night the Kingdom’s new campus of Arab Open University, a project of the Arab Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organizations (AGFUND).

He inaugurated the campus on behalf of Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, president of AGFUND and chairman of board of trustees of AOU, and toured the campus with top guests of event.

The opening ceremony was attended by Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf, Minister of Education Ahmad Al-Issa, and AOU Rector Modi Al-Homood, along with a large audience of senior government and private sector officials, businessmen, parents and students.

Al-Issa said that his ministry is working to widen the base of higher education in the Kingdom by involving the private sector and he hoped that AOU will contribute with graduates that respond to labor market needs.

Responding to questions at the press conference following the opening ceremony, Mohammed Al-Zekari, the director general of AOU’s Kingdom branch, said that the university currently has around 11,000 students from 40 nations, hoping that the new campus will help to accommodate more.

The new campus has 50 lecture halls, educational labs, a big library, a large auditorium for different activities, a 350-seat theater, and parking for 400 cars.

The idea of the Arab Open University project was launched by Prince Talal in 1996 as a nonconventional academic institution that uses distance learning, drawing on information and communication technologies, to make higher and continuing education accessible to Arab citizens regardless of their place of residence, giving priority of education to women.

In 2002, the initiative developed to the full-fledged Arab Open University headquartered in Kuwait with a strategic partnership with the Open University in the United Kingdom, and transformed into a university with branches in eight Arab counties: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Oman and Sudan, with a total enrollment of around 30,000.

Since its foundation, the university has celebrated graduation of more than 20,690 students in these counties, more than 50 percent of whom were female.

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