Arab youth: the challenge of tomorrow

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

"Distinguished brains leave and succeed, while 'rigid' minds stay, disrupt Arab life and amplify bureaucracy," the daily Al Hayat columnist Jamil Theyabi wrote. He called for a new attitude on the part of government and society, which offered would-be migrants "a motivating environment" so they were not faced with two choices: "either accept reality, like thousands of exceptional scientists and remain at home, or accept the alluring offers of scientific centres in the West."

Even when Arabs migrate to other parts of the Arab world, losses often occur to countries least able to afford them. Jordan, for example, tended to export its better educated workers to the Gulf states while importing less-educated labour from Egypt and Syria. Egypt exported professionals and skilled workers to the GCC, and uneducated workers to Lebanon and Iraq as well as Jordan.

In the case of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, long established patterns of migration to Europe, particularly France, Belgium and the Netherlands, pushed the North African populations of eight European countries up to more than 2m by 1990. More recently, the study noted, while the population of North Africans in Belgium and the Netherlands had fallen, it had risen since the mid-1980s from 3,000 to 160,000 in Italy, from 9,000 to 235,000 in Spain and from 441,000 to 504,000 in France, according to the latest figures available.

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More recently, reports from the GCC indicate that the supply of Asian labour, including professional, technical and managerial staff, as well as workers, is rapidly drying up due to economic expansion in India and the appreciation of the rupee against Gulf currencies. The chief executive of Bahrain's state-owned oil refinery, Bapco, Abdulkarim Al Sayed, told reporters in Manama in March that in addition to losing 30 key western employees since January, 2006, it had now lost "more than 30" Asian employees as well. "Coupled with the still common misconception outside the region that the Middle East is a dangerous place to work," he said, "it is ... difficult to attract foreign professionals to the region. The inevitable result is that employers are going to have to pay inflated prices to attract the necessary resources, driving up the cost of projects and further restricting the development of indigenous talent."

The construction sector in the GCC is expected to be particularly badly hit by the withdrawal of Asian labour, according to Abdulmajeed Al Gassab, vice-president of the global professional association, Project Management Institute (PMI). He said projects in the Gulf that rely heavily on professional and skilled migrants from Asia are already facing "an acute shortage" of workers. "The golden days of cheap labour from Asia for the Gulf contractors are gone," he told a forum organised by PMI in Manama in Match.

For the Arab world's new graduates, as well as its skilled workers, the vast expansion of the Gulf economies plus the huge influx of oil revenues might be seen as a ray of hope to counter the prospect of un-or-underemployment at home. But, as the Arab League and World Bank indicate, the future of the Arab world's most talented younger generation depends on enacting reforms to the labour market that will foster career prospects, access to research and development, and good housing and services as well as higher wages. Measures to ensure that both skilled and unskilled workers in the region are properly valued, as well as encouraged to develop further their talents through vocational and/or technical education, are also vital, along with more basic, but essential, efforts to eradicate the high rates of illiteracy still existing in certain countries in the region.