 Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to welcome you to this discussion panel as part of the web for the MENA region held at the Dead Sea. Our session's topic is a topic that is of importance to each family. Layla is at the last year of school. What is she going to specialise in? Sami also is going to leave his work and find another job. Rami is selling his mum over WhatsApp that he is going to accept a job outside and will not come back home. All these are examples not only related to Layla, Sami and Rami as examples of individuals, but it is the story of the future of their countries, their economies and their societies. The fact is that demographic growth has made it that half of the population is youthful with one fourth of them does not have jobs. This is a theme that is of concern to everybody throughout the world and we will be focusing on some general trends before going into some specific themes. My guests today represent various scopes and stakeholders. They are, and I start on to the left side, the Minister of Social Development in Egypt, and we know the problem of youth unemployment and its risk to social society at large. Ron Bruden is the founder and chair of the Education for Employment Foundation that has trained 28,000 young people in Arab countries and has enabled them to be part of the job market. Nidal Al-Qatameen is the Minister of Labour of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and he is keenly interested in jobs of course. John Hayley is the CEO of Towers Watson which is a specialized consultant on human resources and management. Tarik Surtana-Laysa is the CEO of Agility and he represents the private sector that is in need of various skills. And we will be asking him about how he finds skills and how he attracts them, particularly when it comes to the national skills and in the GCC area. We will be touching upon three areas, demographic shifts and structural unemployment in the region and we will be dealing with advances in technology and the impact across industries and the creation of new jobs. And the third theme will be how to deal with knowledge-intensive economies in our region and whether all the developments are made in parallel. Ms. Ghada, we know that the demographic growth has led to a lot of unemployment at the same time. We need to know that education has quite developed in the region. Electricity has been combatted and we have many holders of high diplomas. And in spite of this, we find that unemployment is quite prevalent amongst the youth and it seems that unemployment is quite chronic. Yes, ma'am, I agree with you that many investments have taken place in the education sector that led to a growth in the number of educated people and university graduates. We have huge numbers of university graduates. But in Egypt, for example, where we have 90 million people and 50% of them are less than 20 years old, this presents quite a wealth when it comes to the job market. However, the youth unemployment is higher than the average unemployment. If it is 12.8% generally speaking, amongst the youth it is around 28%. And this is quite a source of concern. The years when graduates of the universities spend looking for work is three to five years. And this is also another source of concern. Another problem is that there are available jobs on the market and there are private businessmen that are seeking workers and workers who are seeking jobs. However, how to match the needs is the problem. And that is because of the various reasons. The skills acquired by the youth are not necessarily those requested or needed by the private sector in 2015 in particular. Another problem is that the young people in Egypt and in other Arab countries are reluctant to work in the private sector. Why? Because there is this prevalent culture that the public employment provides more social insurance in terms of social funds and pension, etc. And this is not available in the private sector. We also have another problem. The informal sector is growing and there is no protection in that informal sector. The growth of this informal sector in spite of the fact that it provides job opportunities as well as the other two elements. In addition to the fact that families encourage their children to work with the government rather than with the SMEs and the private sector in order to reduce risk exposed to, all these factors present main and major challenges to the government in Egypt and other Arab countries. Another challenge is how to involve women in the job market. We talked about 30% of unemployment amongst the youth. What is even more serious is that the women contribution in the job market is around 22% only out of the job market. And this is another source of concern. And we know that work is a source of decency for every person and would allow us to take out of poverty. Ron, to follow up on what Ghada said. There are university graduates who do not find job opportunities. And we know that this is the case throughout the world, not only in the Arab world. But it seems to me that the more or the higher the diploma is or the new university degree is, the more difficulties he finds to find a job. How can you explain that phenomenon? With universities and trade and industrial centers to teach them how to better place their youth in jobs. There's a university working with right now in Morocco. There are 27,000 students, you know of it, but I'll leave it unnamed for now. Their placement rate is 18%. 82% of their graduates do not get jobs. We are now working with them and we believe we can bring that down to 60% on a placement basis. But the numbers are just astounding. The opportunity is great. In Egypt, for instance, if you're able to create women employment, so it matched male employment, we create $34 billion, according to the World Bank, of additional revenue per year. Mr. Kattameen, when we talk about demographic growth and the fact that there is a youth bunch and that there is a mismatch between the education and the job market needs, let us add to all of this the problem of refugees in Jordan. Then what would be the concern on the part of the Jordanian government? Well, ma'am, believe me that the political situation in the Arab world has impacts on employment and economy in general. We need to have true, genuine strategies that deal with this issue. But the political environment represents an impediment to that. The global economic crisis that started in 2008 and then it was followed by the 2010 beginning of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and expanded to Egypt, Yemen and Libya. And then it was launched in Syria in a bloody manner later on. All these impacted Jordan and affected any efforts to control unemployment. And there is lack of coordination amongst Arab countries to control unemployment and to find or to achieve real integration to fill out the gaps between the gaps in the mismatch. All this has affected all Arab countries, including Jordan. Jordan has passed through very serious conditions because of the stability situation and has become quite attractive to the neighboring countries because of our stability in comparison to the neighboring countries. So anybody who requires stability would come to Jordan. And that meant that 20% was the increase in the population of Jordan every 8 to 10 years. So if we look at the incoming workers figures, we can say that we might absorb some Asian workers. But this is, and of course we try to follow human rights equations and international agreements. But we have to be aware that there are five sensitive issues that have affected unemployment, particularly amongst the youth in Jordan. First, what Rada has said, that it is not very attractive for young people to work with the private sector. The public sector employment figures were very high. However, to change the culture, to encourage people to work in the private sector was quite costly. We needed to build bridges with the private sector to encourage the young to go to the private sector. Another problem is that we have lack of qualified skilled trained youth in the various sectors. So we need training institutions and this should be part also of the academic university programs where our students can gain new skills. We have 33 universities in Jordan that do not focus on these extra qualifications and skills. The third problem is that the contribution of women is very low. And we needed to have promotion policies to involve women in the various sectors of the economy under very dire circumstances. However, we were able to cooperate with the private sector and we were able to provide incentives to the private sector to absorb these additional figures. Another serious issue in Jordan is that we focus in the private sector on main urban cities. We have four main cities in Jordan and the majority of the private sector companies are in those four cities. Which means that there is unfair distribution of the job opportunities. And this is a main challenge in Jordan and we need to review it in order to be able to create new jobs. And to be able to employ even university graduates. Thank you. Mr. John, the minister has just said that in the Arab world the private sector needs to exert many efforts to convince the youth to work in the private sector. What would the private sector avail to the youth in the future in order to promote them or encourage them to come and work with the private sector? Or is it because the public sector gives them a lot? Is this the real problem? Yes, so I think the private sector is one. Let me just first comment about some surveys we do around the world. And I think these also apply to a large extent in Middle East, North Africa. We talk to companies about what kind of trouble they have finding workers. And right now if we talk to them about a third of companies say they find it difficult or extremely difficult to hire workers. And a third of the companies finding it difficult seems reasonably high. But when we break it down we find it actually varies quite a bit. When we ask companies how hard it is to find university graduates fewer than 20% say that that's a problem. When we ask them about hiring employees that are identified with critical skills almost two-thirds of the companies say that they have trouble finding that. And when we ask about finding critical skills in the high growth economies almost 80% say they find trouble. And private employers and what they're looking for and what they're trying to get it actually varies and you have to look at it specifically at what they're looking at there. I think there are two things that I would say are affecting Middle East, North Africa particularly. And one is the issue of demographics. So we all know that the population of the world is growing. But it's in fact growing quite unevenly. The areas where there's a lot of jobs being created in a lot of the OECD countries not only is the population not growing fast. I mean in Europe the population is declining in particular the working age population is seeing some significant declines. Even China from 2015 their working age population is going to decline. On the other hand you have places like Lebanon has the highest population growth rate in the world. Jordan and Qatar are also in the top five. When you look at the places though where the high growth is of course we're getting this talent mismatch. So Towers Watson has done some work with a group called Oxford Economics in England. And we took a look at what this means for talent and the need for talent in the world. And we find that even as soon as say 2021 places like the UK and Germany will have talent shortages of five to ten percent. But places in the Middle East and North Africa will be seeing talent surpluses. More workers than they can profitably find jobs for of between two to eight percent. So these are pretty significant differences that we're going to see. In addition a phenomenon that I think is bigger right now in say the OECD countries is the effect of longevity. We have people living longer. Of course OECD countries the average life expectancy is over 80. In Middle East and North Africa it's up to 75. People are living longer. They're in better health and jobs maybe are not quite as arduous as they used to be. So they're in fact able to work longer. When we talked to people in we just did a survey in Middle East and North Africa of about 2600 workers and asked them were they going to work longer than they had been in the past. People had in the past 52% said yes. That number by the way is significantly higher in Europe and I think that number will indeed be going up in Middle East and North Africa. So all of this points to I think what the previous speakers mentioned is there is some something of an imbalance and in fact as tertiary education improves in the Middle East, North Africa or indeed even in Turkey we've seen the same thing. What you find is there's a bigger mismatch because we haven't created as many job opportunities. Tarik I would like to talk with you about a very specific issue related to the GCC about the job market. We know that the growth rates are on the increase but there is also unemployment and we have noticed that there is another phenomenon in the GCC. The local workers work in the public sector and the very few of them work in the private sector. Can we safely say that there are parallel job markets in the GCC countries including Kuwait? Yes of course says Tarik. The title of the session is the future of jobs. We should have said no future without jobs would have been a more appropriate title to the session because this is what we have been witnessing in the Middle East. The negative impact of lack of work in the vast majority of Arab countries according to World Bank statistics there is a gap in the job market and we need one million jobs. That will be the gap and we have 30% unemployment rate and it is on the rise particularly amongst the younger generations. This leads to extremism. I have read in a newspaper job vacancy in a given country that I shall not name $600 a month with covering the expenses of marriage and we know that in other... You are talking about extremist groups that put out such ads. Yes of course that's what I meant by it. If the situation continues as is it means that we will have the largest talent pool for extremists to draw out from. Let me fill up on this issue about the public private sectors. Now you are working in the private sector. The majority of workers in the private sector are they coming from Kuwaitis or from other countries. The problem that we have in the Middle East is that public policy leads to various problems. We have two problems Saudi Arabia and the UAE which should be put on the side because their performance was quite excellent in this field. So with the exception of these two countries we can say that the majority of Arab countries are from rank 70 to 150 in terms of ease of access or procedures for the business environment. The web has another statistics that indicate the following. That there will be $45 million a year in addition to the income if the business environment is improved. And this as I have said is $45 billion sorry not million as value added. All these countries that have like SMEs and these SMEs can provide around one tenth of the job opportunities. However when we have bureaucratic issues and red tape this means that SMEs cannot grow which means that countries that require more employment and cannot benefit from these available people who can work because of bureaucratic issues. This is an issue. In the Gulf countries investment in education is very good when compared to international figures. However the outcome of education is not appropriate to the job market. The question is why? Why is it so? The majority of the young people in the Gulf countries are studying at excellent universities and they find job opportunities with the public sector even if their ranks are not very high. The question is why should they go to university if they are going to work with the public sector and stay there. All right let me turn to Ms. Wally before we finish the first half of this session. Ms. Ghada I have a question for you. The young people are going to the public sector and the public sector feels that there is job security. However it is creating this social problem which is lack of competitiveness which means that the public sector should stop employing and should encourage the youth to go to the private sector. How can this be solved? What is the environment that is required to promote and encourage the young people to go to the private sector rather than going to the public sector and how would that help through the SMEs? We need to have long-term interventions. The policies adopted by the government were to call upon the young people and work with them and the minimum wage policy was implemented in the public sector and not in the private sector which means that in the public sector the civil servants get higher wages than those in the private sector which means that the minimum wage rule is not implemented in the private sector. Another point is that we need to provide training for the youth in order for them to find job opportunities in the private sector and the private sector to find the qualified youth. We also need to have an enabling business environment to the SMEs and we should encourage entrepreneurship culture that would support businessmen and would lead to more employment in the formal economy and not in the informal economy. SMEs, if they are supported, they can be part of the production chain and would lead to an increase in the exportation. We need to provide opportunities for thousands of hundreds of people that enter the job market. We need to have a better efficiency of investment and distribution investment. The majority of investment in Egypt is in the north. 27% of our poor people are in the north areas and 67% of the people in the southern areas and there isn't enough investment in the southern areas. Not only the quantity but also the quality. We need to have labor intensive investments in order to provide jobs to the largest numbers of people and we need for the government to provide incentives for the labor intensive policies of the private investment to focus on highly dense areas. Another issue, the government investment should focus on Swiss canal and project and the construction sector that are sectors that bring a lot of job opportunities to the people. We should focus on training, as I have said, but remember that our young people go to training that is not very expensive and it is not internationally recognized while we need to provide them with skills to work with the OECD areas and they need to have skills and a job culture that is completely different. Investment in education, investment in training because training is shorter than education and we know that education is our main objective but it is a long term issue so we should focus on training which is short term and it should provide skills. Another issue is to provide incentives to work with the informal sector because there isn't enough protection to the informal sector workers. The private sector practices sometimes pull away the workers because they offer low jobs or low wages and they don't provide social insurance all the time. Another issue is to have awareness amongst all. The workers sometimes ask their employers not to enroll them in the social schemes because they want to have more wages and this should not be accepted. The government should impose the law and the private sector enterprises that work in the formal economy to ensure their workers and to provide them with the minimum wage. This means that we need to have wide adjustments to the job market and to reduce the unemployment rate and various speakers have talked about the need to increase women contribution to the job market and not to have a mismatch between the job opportunities and the needs of the private sector. We will be talking about the necessary skills that the youth should have and we will cover this issue after the promotion, the ad. Thank you. Welcome again to this talk on television. We are talking about the qualifications of young people in the region in order to find good jobs in the future and this question is addressed to you, John, of course. What do you give young people in a few days in short sessions? What is it that you teach them that will allow them to find jobs whereas thousands of others do not find jobs and do you have succeeded? It's okay. I can do the translation and then I'll cut it to the edit. It's not our secret. We share willingly with anybody. We work backwards in each of our affiliates and these are standalone foundations that work... I can't read that. It's too far away. Each of our affiliates, and we're in Egypt short, Morocco, Yemen, Gaza, West Bank, Tunisia, Dubai and Saudi and growing, each of our affiliates makes the decision on their own as to what jobs are needed and so they will work with industry. Our board of directors work with ministers, ministers of social solidarity and others to figure out where the jobs are hidden and we found that there are a couple of key opportunities that work very well. Like the most successful program we have, we started in Jordan six years ago and it teaches youth how to work. It's called a soft skills program that we built with McGraw Hill and it teaches these young inexperienced kids how to write a resume, how to interview, critical thinking, leadership, public speaking, work ethic, productivity, time management and we deliver this in up to three months and what it really does with these kids is it gives them self confidence. They leave our program believing that they can succeed and because they do believe they can succeed, they do. It's a phenomenal that I never expected. We shoot for 85% of our graduates getting into the labor market. The Tunisians don't understand that because they've been placing 100%, which we didn't expect. The Yemeni are at 38% because it's Yemen and things are really tough there but despite everything that's going on we're focusing in Yemen. We focus on training women. The majority of our graduates are women. Once again, 70% of our graduates in Tunisia are women going down to the 30s in Yemen. But we offer simple, quick courses that are needed and vetted. We work with employers. Oftentimes the employer and we have over 2,000 employer partners and growing rapidly. They're our partner. They help us figure out what jobs are needed for the hiring and more and more nowadays they're assisting us in reimbursing the cost of the training because they're getting value. They see that an EFE graduate stays longer, works harder, and is more connected with the job than those that haven't gone through our training. We also have been growing in the area of micro enterprise. We've been running competitions where people submit business plans and from those we call out the best. We provide them with funding. We also provide them with mentoring. Mentoring is a key component, not only in the area of enterprise, but even for graduates who work very closely with our graduates after their graduates and we have very powerful alumni associations and those alumni associations are a key part of enabling their kids to grow. And as we all know in this region, WASTA, who you know is very important. And we are creating our own WASTA. Our graduates are now bootstrapping the current graduates and getting them into the labor force. It's an amazing thing to happen and there's a tremendous amount of loyalty to our new graduates from our old graduates and that's moving it forward. One of the things that hasn't happened yet and they're working on is there is not the ability to provide student loans, which I think is a key component. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a poor neighborhood and I had student loans that enabled me to get through college on a normal basis and that further enabled me to go to graduate school with scholarships. This region needs student loans and we're working on systems to make that happen and two years from now when I come back here I'd like to report that we have enabled student loans to start and we're looking at doing a program in probably Tunisia and launch that and if it works well and I think it will, it can really change the landscape of education. You can come in and take a course, it'll be self-sustaining, it'll be market driven, it'll get paid back by the employer. Mr. Al-Katameen Ron just talked about the problems that that young people are finding, those who would like to carry on with their studies and the problems of student loans which is quite absent of our region but in Jordan you have some success stories in the business environment of small enterprises in IT and today His Majesty the King talked about the Arabic content 70 to 75% of this is due to young people in Jordan but there is a favorable environment in Jordan can you talk to us about this success story in Jordan? Mr. Al-Katameen yes we talked about the fact that in most regions of the provinces of Jordan for example in Jordan the focus is on the major cities so people who are looking for jobs they have to go and find jobs and finance themselves and we have already given loans to about 26,000 people loans of about 20 to 75,000 dinars and these loans are directed as students at women also rural areas and at far away areas but that is not the solution when we are talking about Jordan our situation is improving and we are making progress in order to link up with the private sector in order to reach these far away regions so that we reach everybody but I think that with the unfortunate situation in 4 to 5 neighbouring countries prevailing at the morning we are talking about 100 million Arabs who are living in very difficult situations in war situations we couldn't have a labour strategy if we didn't have a coordination at horizontal level and also integration with the other countries but unfortunately this is impossible in view of the prevailing situation and we have tried to solve this problem over the last decades and now we are talking about 100 million young Arab people in the 2020 who will be looking for jobs this is extremely serious it is extremely dangerous there is no integration there is no coordination we are not being able to control migrant workers a lot of things are lacking and this is a reflection of the unfortunate political situation in Jordan we are making progress but we have huge challenges as a labour minister I can find 4 or 5 jobs but I have so many nationalities in Jordan that are going to be competing with Jordanians because there is no social security they are coming from countries where there is no security no stability they are here they are trying to find jobs in any which way they need to survive they need to eat there is a difficult situation and there is a lot of competition on jobs and there is no other solution except if we find an Arab system in order to solve the problem the problem of unemployment in coordination with all the countries except especially the countries that have today opportunities where they have investments such as the UAE such as Saudi Arabia but there has to be horizontal and vertical coordination to control this unemployment situation and solve it because this is something that is keeping us awake the other thing and this is very important where there is a lot of imbalance most countries think that those who can solve the unemployment problem are the ministers of labour and the ministries of labour and it is the state in the constitution of most countries that is in charge of labour and it is the ministry of labour but it is all the sectors all the ministries that have to modernize themselves they can adjust the product with the outlet so that the product that is coming out of universities can find a job and this has to be done today minister of health can talk about unemployment in the health sector he is responsible for the health sector not the minister of labour and this is why we haven't been able to control the situation because it is up to everybody to contribute another question addressed to Mr. John Haley when the minister talks about the very difficult situation in the region and this is an almost impossible equation can we find a solution without thinking about innovation isn't innovation something absolutely essential in order to look differently to the various tools that are at our disposal in your company but in charge of innovation is that not true yes I do think innovation is something we need to do first of all yes we do have somebody in charge of innovation actually she's she's not so much there to come up with all the innovative ideas herself what she is there with and I want to mention this because I think it's helpful in thinking about what we need to do in an economy she's there to make sure we have the right infrastructure so that we can take the ideas that people have and we can pair when people have different ideas on how to create new client solutions or technology or something like that she pairs them up with somebody who helps them develop a business case who helps them pilot test it and then who takes it forward so that we can decide whether or not to invest in that and to develop a product and I think similarly in an economy what you really need to do is not to try to have something that's governmental that provides innovation what you need to have something governmental is something that helps all the people in the economy to take their ideas and to help build them into successful enterprises I think I recognize that there are very important functions that government provides and so the public sector is something that's important to any well functioning economy but when you're really talking about growth and creating the maximum of your jobs for the future you really need to have a thriving private economy and so the major function of government is not so much to provide jobs for people but to provide the conditions under which jobs can be created and I guess one thing we sort of been dancing around this a little bit but just to make sure it's obvious job problem in the Gulf to create jobs is largely a youth problem in a way that it isn't anywhere else so in Europe about 35% of the people are under the age of 29 in the Gulf states that's 57% excuse me and in fact in Qatar 50% of the nationals are under the age of 15 so when we're talking about when we're talking about addressing unemployment we're talking about addressing youth unemployment in a way that we aren't anywhere else in the world Mr. Tariq we talk about growth in technology and we talk about the unemployment crisis in the youth circles a lot of jobs are going to disappear to what extent are we going to be able to do that and I think what you said for this change you said that there are a lot of alternatives that are bad in the region so let me talk first of all about innovation what we need in terms of innovation is first of all to facilitate procedures streamlining procedures 20 countries do they have an unemployment problem? No so I think the question that we should be asking today is each government in the Middle East has the possibility to streamline the business environment but we can do what we can but we need we need investment we need what we need is not investment we need to streamline the business environment this is what is going to solve unemployment I think this is a very important thing the second thing I think 70% of graduates of university graduates in the Gulf it is a huge rate but let's not forget about those who work in the private sector supposing we're at a soccer match to win the match this is how we're going to deal with it in the future this could be solving a problem the moderator is saying is it a social problem we have this problem in Jordan your excellency we were asking people in Amman what should women do and very often we got answers that were quite shocking but some numbers show that women are absent from the job market how do you deal with this issue policies have to focus on women empowerment for example let's say that there is a kindergarten and a woman could go and work at this kindergarten and she could work there very comfortably but there are a lot of enterprises in Jordan and there is a campaign now in both sectors in the public and there should be one standard whether we talk about the private or the public sector because the labor law is to be applied to everybody and there shouldn't be any discrimination between the two sectors talking about the private sector is new in the Arab world because there is no public sector that takes more than 5% of those who enter the job market but the private sector is the motor production of economy and there should be a focus on finding real jobs in the private sector with the same privileges that exist in the public sector we should empower women but unfortunately salaries are different for women and men to have people try to find to find out what's the rate of women we haven't been encouraging women employment we have three issues that are very sensitive first of all to have daycare centers in enterprises in most enterprises there has to be daycare center in companies and there has to be people caring for children secondly we have people with special needs we are focusing also on this and on jobs for women we have increased the participation of women from 15 to 46% in 2004 and we have to take into account the freedom that has to be given for women when they are being employed and some flexibility has to be afforded we have to focus on this in Europe and developed countries that have been able to solve this problem we have a situation a political situation that is impacting the situation Qana'a Mr. Ron do you think that in the Arab region governments believe that it is important to work in partnership with the private sector and with organizations such as your organization in order to approach the issue of education do you feel that governments are stepping back from this monopoly that they had on education I've been doing this 10 years and 10 years ago I would have definitely thank you I would have definitely said that governments do not governments in a sense were our adversary but I've seen a shift especially in the last three or four years that governments are now coming to us and working with us and where they look at us as an ally and we're working with their universities working with their training centers there's an awareness that they have a problem and they look at us at assisting them to solve the problem so the situation I think has changed radically in the last 10 years and one thing I wanted to point out it's been mentioned here about the 100 million jobs by the year 2020 the 100 million jobs does not solve it keeps the number exactly where it is today so it's even a bigger number than 100 million we should be aware of that, it's a challenge but the government I find in all the countries that we're operating are taking a much more introspective proactive, humble look at things that they weren't 10 years ago it's a much different and a much more healthy environment says that we will need more jobs and the situation will not change if we carry on as we are how does Egypt deal with this with the democratic growth the problem of mismatch and we also have the technology which is going to lead to the disappearance of a lot of jobs such as in banks Mrs Wiley we think that technology has its positive and negative effects because technology allows to offer all sorts of services first of all it allows you to work remotely from home which means that more women will be able to work and are able to work and this allows for cold centers to be set up and there are lots of jobs in highly populated countries chances to find jobs for women technology technology is going to lead to the disappearance of jobs that will give rise to jobs which need better technological skills Mrs Wiley yes you put your finger on the issue young people have to learn new skills they have to acquire skills that will allow them to integrate not only the local market but also the regional and the international job market it is important to invest in IT it is important to invest in innovative skills and the skills described by Ron in order to acquire training in management in self-confidence we have to finance young people and we have to allow young people to find out where the jobs are so that they can access the job markets and what is also important to invest in vocational training we have a new ministry vocational training and vocational educational ministry in Egypt and also there is a new law on public service in order to give a chance to the government to reduce the number of people employed in the public sector and in order to hold to account those who are not being productive and to let them go when they are not being productive and this new law is going to improve the performance of the civil servant the issue of training and education is very important but we haven't talked about the organizations of civil society their role is extremely important to give access to young people to job markets and media is very important because they can encourage the private sector and they can also encourage the private sector to keep the working and the successful models but there are models where the private sector that gives a very good job opportunities and opportunities to train and to grow and there are models that are belonging to huge enterprises in Egypt which have known how to keep the employees and how to attract them by creating a favorable environment and governments have to create the favorable the encouraging the incentivizing environment and shouldn't be competing with the private sector by offering better job opportunities and then they will wonder why they don't attract enough people. I thank you this brings us to the close of this session I thank you Mrs. Radawele Minister of Social Solidarity Mr. Ronald Rood the founder and chair of the employment Mr. Nital Mardid Katamin Mr. Label of Choudan Mr. Tarik Santana Chief Executive Officer of Agility and Mr. John Haley Chairman of Towers Watson We have a few minutes here we can entertain questions from the audience Hello my name is Afif I'm a global shaper from the Beirut hub my question is to anyone from the panels who would like to answer my question is we've been missing the concept of civil society which employs a huge number of youth in the region specifically in Beirut and Lebanon where there's a lot of pressing issues and donations are coming through civil society we have a huge number of youth in the region specifically in Beirut and Lebanon but there's no platform to develop skills of youth to actually excel at that field or excel at that type of industry so what's your feedback and why isn't it in any one of the calculations thank you We would like to answer the question We have 47,000 civil society organizations if 2,000 of them only is active they can offer a lot of job opportunities we have a new strategy that started about 7 8 months ago which is divided into 4 sections first of all the databases in order to give information to everybody about these organizations first of all we have to find out what these societies are we have to allow them to communicate with each other and to network secondly we have to have a law to encourage these organizations to work thirdly we have a funder to finance these organizations to make donations to them and fourthly we have to create the management and we have to professionalize these NGOs so everybody can work in them we have to teach them how to manage their projects how to obtain funds how to fund projects we have a number of institutions in Egypt and organizations of civil society which are managing huge projects we are talking about projects such as the Children's Cancer Hospital which is being managed by a civil society organization which is offering better services than governmental hospitals but are in competition with private sector hospitals we have the food bank we have other large organizations which are working in a very professional way where very good people are graduating from if we create the favorable environment for them the funding this is going to provide lots of jobs in our society but in our country in our region in spite of the fact that the Arabs Muslims that those who live in the Arab region do give money and make donations but we don't have this culture of donation but we don't we give money but we don't donate time and very often private sector we find that few people have the time and money to volunteer their services in the last few years where the role of government has diminished there are a lot of sectors where you will find the civil society very present to fill the gap that was left by the public sector in the health sector a lot of services are being offered by civil society organizations and we need more of that we need more investments in non-traditional sectors we find we tend to help charitable organizations with regard to illiteracy with regard to Quran institutions but we have a lot of charitable institutions but we need a lot more civil society organizations in some Arab countries if the enterprise itself is going to find difficulty to be set up there's going to be problems because very often the signic is to have headquarters and we're talking about streamlining the business environment making it easy for companies to be set up this is going to be impacting on all the sectors without us feeling the consequences so we have to improve the business environment we have to halve the new laws otherwise we won't be able to do anything another question perhaps Hello, I have a global shaper from Erbil de Hab as well my question is for the minister of labor in Jordan as Mr Sultan mentioned and for me being raised and born I'm living in Kuwait right now and you mentioned something about making the working environment more appealing for investors to come in and just open businesses for me coming from Erbil we have 16 universities in the city of Erbil alone and we have 117,000 students and when they all graduate they just get out of the country either out of the country or go to Oman to work because all the private sector are there so what is the government doing to make the people of Erbil staying in Erbil instead of going somewhere else thank you I'm sorry in English since you asked the question basically what you're saying two parts for your question number one is how would you be able to find a job opportunity in Erbil rather than just coming to Oman for it which is true this is what exactly I was saying at the beginning in the developing world the concentration of working forces are usually centered around the capitals and about the outskirts even of the capitals they're deprived of the job opportunity to come and find a job at the same rate of salary as the one who's actually within Oman district so this is an issue that has to be addressed it has been addressed lately within the government of Jordan by opening up industrial zones in almost every government outside and now with the investment laws and bylaws that we've just established we are in fact encouraging all sector with a lot of incentives to go and open up whatever they could at those remote areas in order for all professions to be able to actually work at their place second part of the question is you have six universities in Erbil let me just tell you one thing that the universities in the third world countries are not contributing at all to anything related to the educating or the education of graduates of how to seek employment and how to work to find jobs of their own they have no ability whatsoever to actually be able to immediately transitionally move smoothly into the labour market they're not they're just a teaching institution they're nothing else and unfortunately we have to really work on our universities to make sure that they are part of this society and they should be able to host within the area that is actually hosting them the opportunities for those graduates who graduate from those universities our time has come and I hope that many of you have the opportunity to share your advice and you can follow up with these questions with our speakers outside this hall thank you very much for your attendance and we'd like to adjourn now thank you