At the end of the summer holidays, children and young people across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) once again donned uniforms, packed satchels and headed to school, as more than a quarter of the region returned to class.
In Syria, a quarter of the country’s population, some 5.3 million people, are enrolled in schools, while 38 percent of Saudis, 46 percent of Yemenis, 31 percent of Jordanians and 31 percent of Egyptians are below 14 years of age. Altogether, half of the MENA’s (including Iran) 300-million-plus people are under 24 years old.
While all these kids are enrolled in school, there is no pressing socio-economic problem. But over the next decade as students graduate and want to enter the workplace, finding employment for them all will be difficult. Already the Middle East and North Africa have the highest unemployment rates in the world, at 9.4 percent and 10.3 percent, respectively, with unemployment expected to rise further this year, according to an International Labor Organization report.
According to UN projections, the MENA’s population will reach 430 million by 2020, of which 280 million are expected to be urbanites — already the three mega-cities of Tehran, Cairo and Baghdad are home to 25 percent of the region’s population. This rapid urbanization stresses infrastructure and exacerbates not only the employment problem, but other issues afflicting the MENA region to varying degrees, including political instability, food insufficiency, drought and energy shortfalls. Furthermore, a main pressure valve that used to keep some of these woes at bay — finding work abroad — has led to remittance reliance, a revenue stream that cannot be taken as a certainty.
The Gulf was once considered an employment paradise for the rest of the region, taking in millions of white and blue-collar workers. But given the economic contraction of the past year, the Gulf gold rush is not as robust as it once was, with workers laid off and remittances down. Moreover, the majority of expatriate workers in the Gulf are not Arabs but Asians. Some 1.5 million Egyptians, for instance, work in the Gulf, compared to 4.8 million Indians. Unless there is a pro-Arab employment policy, the Gulf cannot create enough jobs for the MENA’s burgeoning youth.
The viability of migrating outside the MENA region for employment is also questionable. Europe’s rapidly aging population will increasingly be leaving the workforce, but it is far from a given that this will lead Europeans to be more accommodating to large numbers of Arab job-seekers, whether they are ‘guest workers’ or given full citizenship. While many Europeans acknowledge that there will be a need for migrants to pick up the slack, there is also jingoistic concern about a ‘Eurabia’ developing.
The onus has to be on the MENA region’s public and private sectors to come up with viable solutions and programs. But what kind of model should they follow? Promoting more of the same 1970s-style American capitalism flaunted in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region, with its rampant consumption, large cars and excess is as undesirable as it is unattainable — and unsustainable.
Moreover, the Chicago school of economic theory, championed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has taken a serious battering, evidenced by rising unemployed in the West and the billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money used to bail out the financial sector. Economic growth is all well and good, but when surging growth is then followed by a staggering collapse, it’s two steps forwards and one step back.
Economic reform in the region is clearly needed, but the crux is in the implementation. For places like Syria, which has been reshaping its economy for the past decade, reforms have created jobs and opportunities, but the main beneficiaries have been the already well off — those able to invest funds into the new stock market and establish holding companies. Reforms benefit Syria’s elite, while the vast majority of the population has seen salaries remain stagnant as real estate prices and food costs have soared. It is a similar story throughout the MENA region, particularly in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
One of the ways to shrink this widening disparity in income is through bolstering small and medium-sized enterprises, coupled with the micro financing that enables such ventures to happen. Improving education levels — to create ‘knowledge-based societies’ — implementing more progressive taxation regimes and population control are other components.
It has long been debated whether a more democratic MENA would be better able to surmount its sociological and political hurdles — an equally pressing issue, however, is how to defuse the demographic time-bomb the region is sitting on.
PAUL COCHRANE is the Middle East correspondent for the International News Service
