Not everything a government carries out is a "state project," and not every government initiative deserves that title. "State projects" are those that outlast the lifespan of any single government, whose effects reach the people, whose results remain in their lives, and which bring about real change in society.
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From this standpoint, the free government school transportation project deserves our attention, not merely as a project to provide buses and transport students, but as a model of what should truly be called a state project.
Public policy is not measured only by the scale of spending, the number of conferences announced, or the number of headlines it generates. Real public policy is the kind whose impact citizens feel in their daily lives. A child waiting for the bus in the morning in a distant village or settlement, who then arrives safely at school and returns home on time, may know nothing about the project's details, agreements, or budgets, but he knows that a state has provided him a safer path to education. That is precisely where the value of the project begins.
The school transportation project in the targeted areas, foremost among them the southern Badia, is not simply a transport service. It carries within it more than one developmental goal at once: it is an educational project because it eases access to school, a social project because it lightens the burden on families, an economic project because it reduces the daily cost of transportation for parents and creates jobs in local communities, a public safety project because it moves students within an organized and secure system, and a development project because it directs a public service to areas that need more tools of empowerment. Above all, it is a project of trust, because when a citizen sees the state reaching him with a tangible service, it reinforces his conviction that development is not a slogan spoken in the capital, but a right that reaches wherever people live. This is a crucial point.
We have long spoken about developing the governorates, the peripheries, and the Badia, and about the need to achieve fairness in the distribution of services and opportunities. But development does not become real until it turns into the small and large details of people's lives. We may talk for hours about empowering the family, but when the state provides its children a free and safe means of transportation, it is practicing empowerment in action. We may talk at length about supporting education, but when it removes from a student the obstacle of reaching his school, it makes education more accessible and sustainable. We may talk about caring for remote areas, but when the bus arrives at a distant village on time, it speaks more eloquently than any official speech. Yes, a state is sometimes seen through a bus window, and this is what makes the project intelligent.
Government intelligence does not mean only using technology, despite the importance of tracking, monitoring, and safety systems. It means, before that, the government's ability to design a single project that achieves several national goals at once. If the project is well implemented, evaluated, and expanded, it can become an important national model for how public services should be delivered, especially when the state acts as funder, regulator, and guarantor of quality, while the private sector participates in operations according to clear standards and objectives. But the most important thing is not to fall into the mistake of treating the project as an achievement that ends once the buses are launched.
The real achievement begins afterward: Has the cost of transportation for families decreased? Has student attendance improved? Has the journey become safer? Has access to education improved? Have local communities benefited from job opportunities? Does the citizen feel the service has improved? And has oversight of safety in boarding, travel, and arrival become serious and rigorous? These are the questions that should govern the project's evaluation.
The beautiful thing is that such projects need little media polishing, because the citizen will judge them every morning. If the bus arrives on time, the driver is qualified, the ride is safe, the parent is reassured, and the student reaches school without his family bearing any additional burden, then the project has succeeded. And here the state becomes present in the citizen's life without needing to talk about its presence.
We need to redefine "state projects." A state project is not necessarily the most expensive, the loudest, or the one most visible at conferences. A state project is one built on a genuine need, one that endures, serves people fairly, is managed efficiently, can be developed from one government to the next, and whose benefit remains after officials change. From this angle, the government school transportation project deserves praise, because it belongs to the category of projects that invest in people before investing in concrete. The road to development sometimes begins on the road a student takes to school. If there are projects that truly deserve to be called "state projects," they are the ones that, when citizens see them, do not ask whose idea it was, or which government carried it out. Instead, they simply say: this is something the state did for me. That is the true standard.
Governments change, officials change, headlines change, but the project that leaves a lasting mark on people's lives endures. Those are the projects that truly deserve to be called state projects. So thank you to whoever thought of it, decided on it, and carried it out.
