Knowledge is the fundamental cornerstone of today's world and an essential addition to achieving sustainable development by envisioning the future, charting its paths, confronting its challenges, and bridging the gap with environmental changes. The aim of this research is to identify the foundations that support higher education that contribute to achieving knowledge-based development in Iraq. This research proposed rapid trends and diligent efforts towards transforming into a social economy and harmonizing with local indicators of sustainable development in Iraq. Especially with the absence of Iraq's achievement of any ranking in the Global Knowledge Index (GKI) in its sixth edition for the year 2022. The Global Knowledge Index monitors the global cognitive performance of countries from the perspective of sustainable development and knowledge-based development that issued by the United Nations Development Program. This raised research questions as follows: (i) is higher education in Iraq capable of meeting the requirements of GKI? (ii) can Iraq achieve advanced rankings in the GKI? (iii) what are the proposed approaches for integrating higher education with knowledge-based sustainable development? The contribution of this paper is to investigate the research questions based on the deductive-analytical approach via framing the necessary requirements for Iraq to enter the GKI and achieve advanced rankings through a cognitive focus on the higher education sector to achieve knowledge-based development.