Home / Domains / Social opportunities

Leisure and community participation

Role of government: Limited Shaped by public administration only at the margin.

Access and experience by state

Each line connects the access score of a state (left) with its experience score (right). A downward slope indicates that access exceeds experience; an upward slope indicates the reverse. The gradient is proportional to the gap.

Bivariate distribution of access and experience

States are classified into terciles of access and of experience in this domain, relative to the other nine states, and shaded accordingly.

Source: A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026 · non-probability samples; scores describe respondents.

The ten states in this domain

Ranking

AccessExperience

44.5Access · regional mean

51.1Experience · regional mean

−6.6Access–experience gap

−0.82How closely access and experience move together across countries (correlation)

What the survey asks: access

Presence of community groups, clubs and organisations, of leisure and sports facilities; membership of groups; unpaid help given to others; frequency of leisure activities.

What the survey asks: experience

Views on the range of opportunities to take part, to volunteer and to use leisure time; satisfaction with leisure activities.

Findings

Access ranges from 34.5 (Tunisia) to 57.7 (Iraq) and experience from 37.3 (Iraq) to 81.3 (Tunisia). Across states the two measures move in opposite directions (r = −0.82), the strongest inverse relationship in the sample.

Yemen and Iraq record membership and activity (57.5 and 57.7) that residents do not experience as satisfying (41.3 and 37.3). Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco and Egypt record the reverse: limited recorded participation (34.5, 36.7, 34.6, 38.1) and much higher satisfaction (81.3, 61.4, 56.8, 53.6). The Tunisian gap, −46.8, is the largest negative gap in the sample.

What the gap may indicate (inference, not measured)Where participation is recorded but not valued, the constraint may be the quality, safety or cost of what exists. Where satisfaction runs ahead of participation, expectations may have adapted to limited provision. The survey does not distinguish these explanations.

Administrative implicationMunicipal and youth administrations can monitor participation rates rather than facilities built, and use the access measure to locate material gaps that satisfaction data would hide.

Citizens voice

“I have no confidence in the work of NGOs”
Lebanon

“Providing assistance to those who need help”
Yemen

What respondents said they would change. Open-ended answers as transcribed in English by the survey team, lightly edited for punctuation; attributed by country only.

Figure 1Leisure and community participation: the gap is widest in Iraq; experience runs ahead in Tunisia

AccessExperienceDotted lines: regional averages

Iraq57.7 · 37.3 Yemen57.5 · 41.3 Saudi Arabia47.8 · 41.5 Qatar47.4 · 42.7 Kuwait46.7 · 47.7 Jordan43.5 · 47.8 Egypt38.1 · 53.6 Morocco34.6 · 56.8 Lebanon36.7 · 61.4 Tunisia34.5 · 81.3

Sorted by the gap between access and experience.

A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026, ten states, N = 1,861. Wave 1 · Release 1.0 · September 2026.Image (PNG)

Figure 2Leisure and community participation: where access is higher, experience tends to be lower

Gulf and Arabian PeninsulaLevant and IraqNorth Africa

Dashed line: access equals experienceDotted lines: regional averages

A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026, ten states, N = 1,861. Wave 1 · Release 1.0 · September 2026.Image (PNG)