“If you plan to farm for one year, cultivate wheat, if you plan to do so for 10 years, grow a tree, but if you want to cultivate for 100 years, develop human beings.”

This is the adage that Saudi Arabia’s leadership has been focusing on for the past number of years, judging by the massive amounts of money allocated for education, health and housing in the national budget.

Salem Baajajah, a professor in accountancy at Taif University, said investment in young people is a basic requirement for the all-round development of a country.

“Parents are now well aware of the importance in the long run of investing in their children. So many of them are sending their children to foreign educational institutions where they can master a number of foreign languages,” Baajajah said.

He said Saudi Arabia is following the example of other successful countries by investing in human resource development. The spending on education and skills is keeping pace with the growth of industry in the country, he said.

Baajajah said there are two parallel efforts taking place — the building of an efficient government and a broad base for education and training that ensures good public sector administrators.

He cited as an example the SR12 billion King Abdullah Project for General Education Development that has been put in place for the next five years. This strategy includes quality training for teachers and the development of curricula.

Journalist Azizah Noufal said the best investment a country can make is in human development. She lauded the King Abdullah foreign scholarship program for helping to develop the country’s youth.

Khaled Jalban, vice president at King Khaled University for Health Sciences in Abha, who is also a family medicine consultant at the university’s medical college, said scientific studies have confirmed that human behavior begins to form in the first five years of life.

He said 90 percent of children are born with special talents but by the time they reach the age of seven only 10 percent retain these gifts. By the age of eight, this falls to a mere 2 percent, he said.

Jalban said the Kingdom has made massive progress in developing the skills of the country’s citizens, which includes the foreign scholarship program, the country’s many universities and technical colleges, and the efforts of the Human Resources Development Fund.