ExxonMobil Qatar and TFQ Are Advancing STEM Innovation in Ways That Should Embarrass American Corporate Education Partners

One type of corporate education announcement has become nearly intolerable to read. Every March, American businesses—especially the major ones—love to introduce glamorous “future of learning” initiatives, complete with hashtags and a video of a kid using a tablet.

Nobody can quite recall what was funded, who taught what, or whether any of it made it through the budget review the following quarter, six months later. It was therefore difficult to overlook the difference when ExxonMobil Qatar and Teach For Qatar discreetly announced the extension of a partnership that began in 2014.

For any corporate-NGO agreement, twelve years is a long time. The majority of American CSR collaborations don’t survive even one CEO change, much less ten years. Nevertheless, this agreement has reached over 62,000 students in Qatar’s public schools, produced 474 trained Fellows, and is about to enter a third year with new commitments pertaining to digital platforms and STEM curriculum. The figures are substantial. The point is the continuity.

When you pass a government school in Doha in the early afternoon, you’ll see the same familiar scene: teachers checking phones in the shaded courtyard, students in white thobes and maroon uniforms drifting out under the glare, and a security guard waving at the same children he waves at every day.

A portion of those educators were part of the TFQ pipeline. Someone, somewhere, decided that funding teacher quality is more beneficial than funding another conference about teacher quality, which led to their recruitment, training, and placement. Twelve years ago, that choice was made, and it continued to be made.

Critics might roll their eyes at this. After all, ExxonMobil is ExxonMobil, a company whose name carries enough stigma that any charitable endeavor is perceived as reputational laundering. Alright. However, the cynicism is reciprocated. The scoreboard in Qatar will read differently than the one in, say, Houston or Irving if impact is the criterion instead of intent. While TFQ Fellows have been teaching real algebra in real classrooms, American school districts that have partnered with large energy companies have spent the same time period creating a steady drizzle of pilot programs.

ExxonMobil Qatar’s CEO, Taher Hamid, articulated the revitalization in terms of national strategy, specifically Vision 2030, the Human Development Pillar, and the Third National Development Strategy. Mostly corporate jargon. Beneath it, however, lies something more intriguing: a foreign operator integrating itself into the long-term human capital plan of the host nation instead of operating parallel charity tracks that are primarily used for annual reports. At TFQ, Nasser Al Jaber discussed educators who inspire and motivate their students. The data is doing the hard work, but the phrasing is softer.

As you watch this happen, you get the impression that the difference between what was promised and what was delivered is remarkably small. It’s worth paying attention to just because of that. The new phase includes expanded STEM tracks and Diwan Al Ta’aleem, a digital learning platform, in line with Qatar’s economic goals of moving away from reliance on hydrocarbons and toward a knowledge-based, more difficult-to-commoditize economy. It’s genuinely unclear if the next three years will yield as much as the previous twelve. Priorities change and pipelines plateau.

However, whether or not this partnership is ideal is not a question worth posing. This explains why so few of its American equivalents are able to display the same type of receipts. Silently, two organizations made the decision to continue operating year after year. It’s not a catchphrase. It’s simply the work.