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The Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) is an independent report sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), providing leading Arab scholars a platform through which to analyze the challenges and opportunities for human development in the Arab Region. UNDP's Arab Human Development Report Project maintains a website on which copies of the Reports are available for download in the Arabic, English and French languages.

Building on the tradition of UNDP's global Human Development Reports, the Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) is a series of publications focused on challenges and opportunities for human development in the Arab region. The reports are carried out by an independent team of leading Arab scholars and researchers, and published by UNDP, which supports the project as part of its efforts to foster a healthy debate on development priorities within the region. Work on the AHDR series was launched in 2000 as a way to respond to a sense of urgency among Arab thinkers as to the precipitous situation of Arab countries at the start of the new millennium. They identified an egregious economic decline in the region since the late 1970s. Such was the plummet in GDP that Spain's GDP was now greater than that of the entire Arab League combined. The first AHDR (2002) provided a full spectrum diagnostic of factors accounting for shortfalls in the area of human development, and summarized its findings by pointing to three major "development deficits" holding the region's progress back: (i) knowledge, (ii) women’s empowerment and (iii) freedom. These were the respective themes of the three follow up reports published in 2003, 2004, and 2005, which completed the first series of the AHDR. The first series of the AHDR made the vital contribution of injecting the Human Development concept into the Arab debate, as well as adding new rigor and frameworks to the consideration of specific development deficits. In their respective areas of focus, the Reports offered a wealth of far reaching, relevant, and at times hard hitting policy recommendations for governments, civil society and international partners. Not all messages were well received by all partners, but many of the messages enjoyed the endorsement of several governments in the region, and the Reports were discussed in hearings and meetings among Arab Foreign Ministers and the League of Arab States. At the same time, universities across the region and the world adopted the AHDR series into their curricula, and the Reports were energetically explored in various policy contexts by think tanks, civil society groups and development institutions across the Arab region and beyond. Moreover, private foundations in the region absorbed and amplified the Reports’ messages. In short, a new set of ideas had been introduced into the regional debate, a contribution toward a reform agenda that has potential to stimulate productive discussion in order to put the pursuit of Arab human development on track.

The starting point for the AHDR2004 was that "The Arab world finds itself at a historical crossroads. Caught between oppression at home and violation from abroad, Arabs are increasingly excluded from determining their own future." From that basis, the report sought to analyze the status and prospects for freedom in the Arab countries. The Report presented freedom as incorporating not only civil and political freedoms, but also the liberation from all factors that are inconsistent with human dignity. To be sustained and guaranteed, freedom requires a system of good governance that rests upon effective popular representation and is accountable to the people, and that upholds the rule of law and ensures that an independent judiciary applies the law impartially. The Report argued that those conditions are not present in the Arab countries. The enormous gap that separates today's reality and what many in the region hope for, the Report argued, is a source of widespread frustration and despair among Arabs about their countries' prospects for a peaceful transition to societies enjoying freedom and good governance. Based on that analysis, the Report argued that the Arab region is at a decisive point that does not allow for compromise or complacency. If the Arab peoples are to have true societies of freedom and good governance, the report argued, they will need to be innovative. "Their challenge is to create a viable mode of transition from a situation where liberty is curtailed and oppression the rule, to one of freedom and good governance that minimizes social upheaval and human costs, to the fullest extent possible." The Report's messages were discussed broadly throughout the region, and amplified by the news media. Aljazeera, for example, reviewed the Report as follows:
True democracy is absent and desperately needed. Most of the time human rights are no more than a poster hung in sham councils and organisations. The educational system is severely retarded; schools produce ignorant young men and women who excel in rote memorisation more than educated innovators. Most intellectuals, even if they deny it, realise that most of what was said in the most recent Arab Human Development Report is true.

The starting point for this Report was the observation that Arab countries have undoubtedly attained significant achievements in the advancement of women, and Arab women have made outstanding achievements in diverse fields of human activity, but much more remains to be accomplished in enabling the equitable acquisition and utilization of human capabilities and human rights by women. The Report argued for the full ratification and implementation of all the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), as well as a wide ranging movement in Arab civil society that engages both women and men in the struggle to steadily expand the frontier of women's opportunities – for the benefit not only of women but for Arab society as a whole. In particular, the Report calls for the adoption of time bound affirmative action, tailored to the specificities of each Arab society, in order to expand the participation of women in all fields of human activity. The Report argued that such measures were imperative to dismantle the structures of centuries of discrimination.

The contents of these reports have not been solely received uncritically. For example, in a response to the first report (2002) published via the Middle East Information and Research Project, Middle East historian Mark Levine welcomed AHDR data as "sorely needed" while also criticizing the overall framework of the study as affirming "bias against Islam and Arab cultural production and political resistance."