Arab youth: the challenge of tomorrow

Middle East, The, August-Sept, 2008 by Pat Lancaster, Pamela Ann Smith, Thomas Land

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The Arab world covers some of the richest and the poorest communities in the world. While the oil-rich moguls of the Gulf States boast disposable incomes of many millions of dollars a year, in the mean streets of Cairo and the mountains of Afghanistan and Yemen, hundreds of thousands live well below the World Bank poverty line--established in 1990--of $1 a day. This disparity has led to a variety of problems, not least in matters of education. While the rich states of the Gulf are working hard to produce graduates of medicine, engineering, technology and communications, the poorer states are struggling to provide semi-literate labourers to dig the multi-lane highways and help build the high-rise concrete and glass towers of their wealthy neighbours.

However, an issue that brings parity to all Arab countries is the certainty of increasing populations year on year, and the stark uncertainty of what the future prospects of these upcoming generations might be.

It is a laudable achievement to consistently produce young men and women with the skills to become trained innovators in a hundred different professional disciplines, as long as there are also people to bake the bread and fix the cars.

In the poorer states there is no shortage of people to bake the bread or fix the cars, but with seriously limited incomes, little cash to be spent on either.

In order to properly address this pan-Arab issue a variety of august bodies have thrown their weight behind various programmes that aim to bridge the gap between the most and the least advantaged Arab states, economic and social divides which--left unchecked--can lead to envy and, possibly, anarchy.

With young people under the age of 18 constituting the majority of the population of the Middle East, they are critical to a positive transformation in the region with education clearly vital in preparing them for the challenges they will face.

Within the next couple of decades the numbers of young Arabs aged 15-to-25 seeking jobs will rise dramatically, even beyond the high rate seen today. Governments throughout the region are seeking to create more jobs in the private sector, or expand vocational, secondary and higher education, in anticipation of this demand. Employing new graduates is proving especially problematic: traditionally absorbed into government bureaucracies and the public sector where they enjoy good, secure salaries, their numbers are rapidly rising beyond the number of positions available, leading to mounting discontent.

Meanwhile, labour shortages for skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers abound in the Gulf states and in certain sectors such as construction, industry and agriculture. The result, some experts fear, could be social upheaval, or economic stagnation, if government action proves inadequate. The current escalating cost of living in the Gulf and in many other Arab states, combined with the effect of market economy reforms that tend to reduce the role of state industries and public sectors in Arab economies, could further fuel the discontent.

A study released by the highly respected international consultants, McKinsey and Company, estimates that the Gulf states alone need to create 4m jobs in the next 20 years. A "demographic" surge in new jobseekers is forming, given the fact that 42% of the population is currently under the age of 15, managing director Kito de Boer told a conference in Dubai earlier this year. "Unless the region's job growth is fast enough to accommodate the upcoming surge, unemployment among locals will continue to rise," he declared. "Disparities in wealth will grow and the further import of foreign workers will place increasing pressure on the most vulnerable members of the nation."

De Boer said that jobs in government created little productivity and the bulk of the millions more openings needed would have to come from the private sector. However, he added, at present private companies in the area were only producing about 82,000 jobs a year.

To help them expand their employment opportunities, the economies of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries-Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman--would have to move from labour-intensive industries and services to knowledge-intensive activities. The educational system would have to be re-vamped, de Boer maintained, and small and medium-sized enterprises given access to more capital and technology.

Unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) currently averages 14% higher than every other region of the world except sub-Saharan Africa, according to a World Bank report released earlier this year. The problem affects virtually every country in the region, the study said, even several oil exporting Gulf economies, which traditionally have had to import expatriate labourers to supplement the national workforce. In some countries, the unemployment rate is close to 20% or higher, including Algeria (23.7%), Morocco (19.3%), the West Bank and Gaza (25.6%).