DOHA: Silatech and Visualizing Impact, two of the region’s organisations dedicated to promoting economic opportunities for youth and social justice, have released an infographic on youth unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.
‘The Long Run’ focuses on youth unemployment and its effect on delayed independence which contribute to the region’s sustained troubles.
The region’s 28 percent of youth labour force is without a job — the highest youth unemployment rate in the world.
This means that over seven million young people must wait longer to gain their first professional experience, and are unable to start saving for a home or marriage and begin on a path towards independence.
In addition to taking a social and financial toll on millions of young people, the high youth unemployment rate adversely affects the region’s economies.
It is estimated that the region’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could increase by $25bn by 2018 if the youth unemployment rate is reduced by half, according to International Labour Organisation (ILO).
“Youth unemployment is a pressing issue in many parts of the world, but nowhere is the problem more long-standing, with action more urgently required, than in the Mena region,” says Dr Tarik M Yousef, CEO of Silatech.
“Without a job, and unable to marry and begin a family, too many young people are locked out from full participation in their societies.
“The anger and desperation we see reflected in news headlines are largely rooted in the frustration of disenfranchised youth without hope.
“Youth exclusion is the single most important challenge faced by the Mena region, and yet it receives a minimal share of attention and resources. It is time for that to change.”
Visualizing Impact is an international creative design studio that focuses on Mena-based social issues.
“Data Visualization has always been a way to express complex ideas in simple terms,” explains Ramzi Jaber, Co-director of Visualizing Impact.
“With ‘The Long Run,’ we created a graphic that uses an easily comprehensible image of a running track to overlay data that gets to one of the most important, yet often under-discussed issues facing the region: that Mena’s high youth unemployment rate is not only detrimental to the region’s economies and delays the independence of many young lives, but is also an underlying foundation to many of the social and economic problems in the Arab world.”
For all their modernity and digital lifestyles, most Mena youth commonly live with their families until they are married.
They are waiting longer than their counterparts in other developing regions to reach their ‘age of independence’.
“If adulthood equals marriage in the Middle East, exclusion from marriage or delayed marriage compromises full participation in society” writes noted scholar Diane Singerman, Co-Director, Middle East Studies, American University in Washington DC.
The Peninsula
