As Gulf states fed with rising revenues from their distinct natural resource, oil, move into a spending spree over massive financial projects, there is growing demand that attention must be given to the underlying and potentially explosive issue of unemployment among the locals.
With a booming population in the region, an estimated 40 million job seekers are expected to enter the labor market within the next decade. This would require governments to be far more creative than ever before to absorb this growing influx.
Handouts and subsidies to nationals would no longer be able to fill the gap, and would tax the respective governments far more than effective employment programs.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum of the UAE recently stated in Jordan: “Our region needs at this moment 15 million job opportunities, and our Arab world will need in the next 20 years between 74 to 85 million job opportunities.”
“We need to develop the infrastructure so we can create jobs,” he added.
Saudi Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi said that fighting unemployment in the Kingdom was a joint responsibility of the government and businesses and has urged businessmen to employ more Saudis. Appearing before the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently, he said, “It is wrong to assume that it’s the sole responsibility of the Labor Ministry. The whole society with all its institutions must come together to tackle this national issue.”
“Unemployment is a complex issue that has no easy solution. We have to find out the reasons and solve them in a scientific manner. Previous solutions were individual views that lacked scientific and methodical thinking,” he continued.
According to the General Statistics Department, there are nearly 470,000 unemployed Saudi men and women, accounting for 12 percent of the total Saudi work force. “The number of unemployed men is 292,905 or 9.1 percent of the total number of Saudi working men while the number of jobless women is 176,113 or 26.3 percent of the total number of working women,” reported the study that was conducted last year.
Unemployment is a complex issue indeed. Economies in the region currently present a picture of robustness and vigor. But beneath the surface there remains the concern that we will lose the battle if we fail to undertake serious efforts to develop long-range plans that would educate, train and put forth an effective work pool.
From my travels in the region, I have witnessed a few such programs. Oman appears to have the best approach right now in that the government partners itself with the individual citizen in the fulfillment of his or her professional ambition.
This comes through the required education and training before the individual is released into the market place. And it is proving effective, as thousands of young Omanis have embarked successfully on small business enterprises.
Bahrain has set up employment programs to train nationals, and offers financial incentives to companies to employ them.
Such an attempt has created a labor fund that invests the taxes of multinationals in training and helps finance small private companies.
In the UAE, businesses help by offering far more work experience and training to young graduates.
Making young people fit for work — a major problem in this region where there is so often a mismatch between the skills delivered by education and what employers seek — is the key to success. A case in point is the Dubai Aluminum Company, which had organized pre-employment courses in a project that doubled employment of locals, including women.
Saudis are looking into options to tackle unemployment, one of which would be to make the recruitment of expatriates more costly to the private sector by raising fees and reducing quotas.
Such steps may be a stopgap measure for now. What are needed are effective institutions of learning and training that address the needs of the market.
A society with hundreds of thousands of unemployed graduates with very little marketable skills does not bode well for the health of any country. While we pride ourselves on the statistics of graduating students, very little is said about the quality of the product.
In oil-dependent countries, government handouts to the nationals have stifled all initiative in them to strive for success the hard way. It had come too easy before, and some among the unemployed are averse to the idea of replacing the foreign pool of labor in less than glamorous jobs.
But unless they and the governments who house and feed them rethink their strategies, it may indeed lead to a social catastrophe in the not so distant future.
The young, the unemployed and the hopeless can often be lured by those people with intent to harm society.
