With 21 million contestants from 52 countries, competition sees largest number of participants to date despite COVID-19

Dubai-UAE: 20, September 2021:  Millions of Arab viewers will be able to watch the announcement of the winner of the Arab Reading Challenge in a closing ceremony to be aired live on MBC channel on Monday. 

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, will attend the closing ceremony, which will crown the winner of the 5th edition of the Arab Reading Challenge from among five finalists. 

The challenge’s 5th edition attracted 21 million participants, the highest ever number in the challenge’s history, from 52 countries (14 Arab countries and 38 foreign countries with Arab diaspora), compared to 13.5 million participants from 49 countries in the 2019 challenge. 
It also drew 120,000 supervisors who helped students improve their reading and summarizing skills, compared to 99,000 supervisors in the fourth edition, while 96,000 schools joined this year’s challenge compared to 67,000 schools previously.

The ceremony will be broadcasted on MBC Channel at 8:30pm (UAE time) on Monday, September 20, 2021.
The Arab Reading Champion will be selected based on the ability to articulate general knowledge, critical thinking skills, communication and diversity of books selected. The event will also see the announcement of the Outstanding Supervisor and Best School.
The “Best School” takes away AED1 million award, while the “Outstanding Supervisor” wins AED300,000 cash prize. The Arab Reading Champion takes home AED500,000 cash prize, bringing the total of prizes distributed to AED11 million.

The closing ceremony is the final stage of the Arab Reading Challenge, which turned the COVID-19 pandemic into an opportunity to utilize digital solutions to encourage school students to read and summarize books. 

Participants were evaluated at class level in countries across the world, then school level, proceeding to the level of the educational district, directorate or governorate, leading up to selecting the top 10 students from each country before filtering down the national winners. Students read and summarize 50 books to qualify for the challenge. 

COVID-19 measures 
Due to the precautionary and preventative measures taken in response to the coronavirus pandemic, qualifying rounds were conducted virtually, and country-level winners were also announced virtually. The judging panels, made up of educational experts, assessed participants’ expressive skills, dialogue capabilities, their intelligence and depth of knowledge, and their ability to sort their ideas and present them clearly.

The ceremony will be a culmination of all the qualifying rounds of this edition of the Arab Reading Challenge. It also embodies the achievement of the challenge’s goals to enhance the importance of reading for all students, improve their knowledge, develop their comprehension and self-expression skills using sound Arabic language, and growing their self-learning skills as well as critical and creative thinking.

The Best School will be selected based on the ability to create a nurturing and supportive environment to encourage students to read and the endeavors taken to cement the habit of reading among students.

The Outstanding Supervisor award will be crowned based on efforts made to support students and guide them to develop critical thinking and communication skills. 

The Arab Reading Challenge stipulates that each participant shall summarize 50 books in five reading passports (each of which has 10 pages), with each book to be summarized in one page. This year’s digitalization drive of the Arab Reading Challenge saw the adoption of digital summaries, rather than paper.
Organized by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, the Arab Reading Challenge creates a knowledge movement that brings together millions of Arab readers from across the world. The challenge aims to nurture an enlightened generation capable of building better Arab societies.