On 22 September 2007, the WIEF International Advisory Panel convened their annual meeting in Jeddah at the headquarters of the Islamic Development Bank. A courtesy call was made on HE Dr Mohamed Ali, the President of IDB in which a number of subjects were broached, with education as one of the main issues discussed. In particular, the discussion introduced the prospect of engaging one of Malaysia’s most successful education institution named MARA, which through its educational corpus and training program, has successfully transformed a huge number of the indigenous population of the country as competent and successful entrepreneurs in Malaysia’s plural society.

The story of MARA started in Malaya, as Malaysia before 1963 was then known, an archipelago which, before British rule, was known as a homogeneous society comprising a predominantly Malay population. When Malaya came under British colonial rule a liberal policy of immigration was pursued by the British thus giving rise to a plural society of Malays, Chinese and Indians. The divide and rule policy of the British aimed at confining Malays to the rural surrounding to become farmers and fishermen, had the effect of producing a society that is socio-economically imbalanced. When Independence was achieved in 1957, the Malays found themselves severely disadvantaged educationally and economically vis-à-vis the other races in the country. An intervention policy designed to redress the uneven socio-economic structure of Malaysia was designed by the founding fathers of independence. This led to the formation of a body called RIDA, short for Rural-Industrial Development Authority, whose principal function was to design a program of training by way of providing rudimentary skills in clerical and allied skills areas to the disadvantaged Malays. There were also courses in simple book-keeping to enable the peasant-oriented Malays to engage in petty business. That was just the beginning of more sophisticated capacity-building initiatives to come.

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