Youth unemployment in MENA: Private sector can help

Earlier this week, Jordan’s Queen Rania spoke at the second Arab Substantiality Leadership Group meeting in Amman. She moderated a panel discussion on “Sustainable Development and Youth Employment in the Arab World.” This topic is of crucial importance: the rate of youth unemployment in the Middle East is the highest in the world and the number of unemployed people under 30 could increase from the current 15 million to 100 million by 2020 – a situation described by the Queen as a “ticking time bomb” that has to be defused before it causes social unrest.

Queen Rania urged making school curricula more relevant to the needs of the labor market, encouraging innovative private-public employment partnerships, and offering internship opportunities in order to bridge the “gap between school and work.” The Jordan Times reports,

    The Queen said the problem in the Arab world is deficit in critical thinking and entrepreneurial skills and overreliance on the public sector for jobs, adding that it is important to create channels of communication between businesses and the educational system to know what they need and thus tailor the curricula to realise that goal. Her Majesty also emphasised the private sector role, which she said can lead and influence policy in the public sector in the Arab world.

Tarik Yousef, Dean of the Dubai School of Government and Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings’ Wolfensohn Center for Development who was one of the panelists, further emphasized the role of the private sector and pointed out that it “can demonstrate what works and what doesn’t.”

Indeed, private sector involvement is a key to addressing the region’s employment challenge. But how can businesses be empowered to become the engine of growth and job creation? Effective reforms must move beyond updating school curricula or providing MENA youth with more internship opportunities. Reforms should make conducting business easier and encourage entrepreneurship – and such reforms need to be rooted in both political and economic ground (see CIPE Issue Paper).

As Queen Rania noted, private sector in MENA can become an important voice helping to make government policies more conducive to entrepreneurship. At the same time, sustainable development requires that the broader public – and especially youth – also has a say in how reforms are designed and implemented. Reforms that make that greater civic and economic engagement possible are the prerequisite for transforming MENA’s unemployment challenge into opportunities for the young generations.

Published Date: November 07, 2008