In a meeting of the Al-Jouf Chamber of Commerce, the secretary general of the Manpower Council, Dr. Abdulwahed Al-Humaid, attempted to clarify some misunderstandings and inexact numbers related to Saudizing jobs. He said that the unemployment rate in the Saudi market was 8.34 percent and that the figure of 30 percent reported earlier by Al-Watan newspaper was totally inaccurate.
His estimate of the number of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia without their families is 6 million; this does not agree with other official statistics that gave the number of foreign workers in the Kingdom three years ago as 2,706,326 males and 935,673 females. These statistics come from a study conducted by economic researcher Abdulmajeed Al-Fayez which was published in Al-Watan; these numbers seem to be half the real number of foreign workers in the Kingdom.
Al-Fayez in fact said that the number of non-Saudis was smaller than the number he gave which represents official figures from three years ago. He said that the majority of working non-Saudi women are maids or wives who have accompanied their husbands to the Kingdom. The number of jobs held by non-Saudi women which have not yet been Saudized is 80,000.
The researcher concluded that the number of jobs that could be Saudized is 32,000 in the public sector and 650,000 in the private. In other words, there are 762,000 jobs that could be Saudized. When we add to this figure that Al-Humaid found that 74 percent of unemployed Saudis are high school graduates or less, we see the breadth and difficulty of the challenges facing us.
We must plan seriously for the future and those plans must take account of the increasing number of university graduates — especially women. Women are 78 percent of the total number of graduates, and job opportunities for them are less than one quarter of their numbers.
Arab News From the Local Press 15 August 2003
