 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, excellencies. Welcome to our panel on the youth imperative, which we think, at least, that this is probably the most important subject that is going to be discussed today. Youth is the biggest challenge and, in my view, the biggest opportunity in the region. We have a fantastic panel with us with all sorts of capabilities and knowledge and activism in their areas. Let me introduce them, and then I'll let them, if you don't mind, frame the discussion and tell us what do they think is the most important opportunities that we are missing in addressing the youth challenge in the Arab world today. To my left, I have Boudoural Qasimi. She is the chairperson of the Sharjah Investment Authority. She is also an entrepreneur and she is an activist in women issues. Then we have Umar Al Ghanem, banker, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and runs family business. Then we have Dr. Mahmoud Jibreel, politician, served as Prime Minister of Libya for a while. He is very relevant to our subject today and expert in training and strategy and has spent years going through training programs across the region. Then we have Princess Carolina de Bourbon Parma. She is an activist and she is the representative for partnerships in Switzerland for the United Nations Relief Works Agency for the Palestinians. Welcome to you all. Welcome to my panel. I'll start with Boudour. Please frame the discussion for us. What is it that we are missing? Thank you, Fadi. It's an honor and privilege to be here. I want to start the discussion with sharing some stories with you about successful entrepreneurs that I personally know. The first story is of this young Jordanian woman. Her name is Noor Al-Hasan and she set up a company called Terjama, which translates documents from Arabic to English. The interesting thing is that she employs a lot of people who work from home, mainly women, and mainly in Saudi Arabia. So it gives them the flexibility to work and to get an income while they're still at home. The second story that I want to share with you is of Khalid Al-Khadir, who I think is here today. He's a Saudi entrepreneur and he's set up Glowwork, which is an amazing initiative that provides employment for Saudi women. And he told me yesterday that he places 26 women a day into jobs in Saudi Arabia. He's a commendable person, actually, for doing this. And thirdly, I want to talk about Najla Al-Midfah, who's here as well today. She set up her company Khayyarat, which is a platform that helps young Emirates get into the private sector, and offers them the training they need to get into the private sector. So these are just three stories of what's happening in our part of the world. And it just illustrates that, actually, it's not all doom and gloom for the Arab millennials. They're actually good things happening. And we need to talk about these stories and share them. And I want to back it up with some statistics as well. In the UAE, I think SMEs contribute to about 94% of the companies in UAE are SMEs, and they contribute to 60% of our GDP, 30% of them are run by women. And I heard you say, Fadi, once in an interview that you get pitched an idea every single day for a company, and you invest in one every two weeks. Is that correct? Something like that. Yeah. So, I mean, what does that show? It shows that things are happening in our part of the world, and we need to talk about these things. Thank you very much. But I'm not going to leave you alone with this one. Let me throw some statistics at you, specifically relating to youth and female youth engagement in the economic cycle of the region. Let me tell you, female youth unemployment in the region is double of the male. So it's at 44%. 44%. It's practically half of them. While 50%, over 50% of our university graduates are women. So there is a massive mismatch. Woman participation in the job market in the region is at a mere 18%. It varies from countries to countries in Lebanon. It's a bit higher. In Saudi Arabia, it's different. In Jordan, it's at 18%. But the most important statistic that I see is very relevant is raising employment rate for both young workers and women to the global average creates 58 million jobs in the region. So if we address the issue of bringing women into the workplace, then we're addressing 58 million jobs. You say, in one of your interviews, I strongly believe in the importance of equipping women. Your Majesty and Your Highness, welcome. You say, I believe strongly in the importance of equipping women to be active contributors in the development. So what do you mean by that? How can we actually bring our women youth who are educated, highly educated, highly capable, but then suddenly something happens. They graduate and they're not part of the economic cycle. Why? What is it that we're not doing? There are a lot of factors, and I might not be able to touch on all of them, but yesterday I read something interesting actually in the Jordan Times. It was a story about this woman, her name was Wujdan Rabani, who wanted to study electrical engineering. And at the time, her parents and her family had said, actually a woman to study electrical engineering, that's unheard of. You're not going to climb electricity poles. We've never heard of that. She actually went ahead and studied electrical engineering, and you might know her now. She is actually the Secretary General of the Energy and Mineral Commission in Jordan. So what does this story tell you? There are probably two things that I can take away from that. The first is perceived gender roles. We have to change the perceived gender roles that we have in our society, so we need to talk about that. And secondly, people like Wujdan, they need to be highlighted more. So it took somebody like her to break that barrier and go ahead and follow her dreams for more women to be able to do that. And that's just one aspect. Other aspects include we need to have more maternity leave, more legislations to support women, and also parenting should be a shared responsibility between both the mother and the father. And in our part of the world, in our society, unfortunately, we don't see that so much. So many issues need to be addressed. Thank you. So you're saying it's a bit cultural? It's cultural, but women need choices as well. So for example, we need to offer them flexible work, we need to offer them part-time work, the option to work from home. And I think the more choices women have, the more likely they are going to become contributing to the economic growth. Thank you. Omar, you're a banker, you're an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. You're a very passionate giver. You're very passionate about Jazeel Arab. In a recent article, you wrote about six or eight months ago in the Huffington Post. You say we need to have on our radar screens youth unemployment and reform and education. They go together. So what do you mean? What is it that we're missing in our education system that does not get our youth the jobs that they need specifically in the private sector? And that's the issue that you've been addressing for years. Yeah. Fadi, thank you. You know, if we look at the youth across our region today, I think there are three cares that we need to cover in order to be able to address that. First is building confidence. Second is job creation for that youth. And then a call to action for what we can do in order to be able to affect change for them. And if we think about the building confidence, my company, we conducted a survey, 2,200 youth across the region, across the GCC and non-GCC countries. And we asked people who had started up companies what their issues were. And Fadi, you work with entrepreneurs all the time. When you ask an entrepreneur what their biggest issue is, it's running out of money. You know, my burn rate, how much cash I have left. And sadly, amongst entrepreneurs in our part of the world, the number one issue they had was government regulations. Number two was running out of capital, but number one was government regulations. And people who were on it to start up companies but weren't able to, their number one factor for not doing that was fear of failure. And in a part of the world where we don't have bankruptcy laws in many of the countries, and many young entrepreneurs face criminal liability when a company fails. There's a lot of risk around that. So, you know, we really need to build confidence amongst our youth. And then we need to create some jobs for them as well. And, you know, we look at one of the themes of the web sessions today, it's infrastructure. We spend 5% on our infrastructure whereas Asia spends 15%. So we've been seriously underspending on our infrastructure. And that's something that could create a lot of jobs for our youth right now. I mean, so we talk about changing education systems. And yes, you know, we spend a lot on education and we're not getting the yield on that spend. And we're not creating enough critical thinkers who are going out there and coming up with the right types of solutions that we need in the private sector. But what are things we can do now? We could spend more on infrastructure and create more uplift and create more efficient economies that have more trade. There's only 10% inter-Arab trade. Europe has 70% trade. Policy in terms of the bankruptcy laws and creating laws that make it easier for banks to be able to fund SMEs. Some risk sharing there. And I think we'll touch on some of those things later. And education. I mean, so getting critical thinking involved. Earlier stages. So getting people with the types of skill sets. If you go to Silicon Valley and you ask what degree people have in Silicon Valley. It's typically not about the degree. It's about the type of thinking they can do. Whereas in our part of the world, we're so caught up with what degree and teaching that specific subject matter, but not teaching how to think. And we need our education systems to teach how to think more. Because when you have that, that's when you come up to the solutions like an Airbnb where you create a parallel industry with capacity that was just there. And you solve problems, innovate the type of problem sets. So I want to challenge you on a couple of things. Please. As a banker and as a private sector employer. What is it that the private sector can do to encourage employment? What are you doing as a big company for startups, for instance? What are you as a bank? And we know that banks are shying away from giving loans to small and medium sized enterprises. And there certainly is the big issue of availability of capital for startups and to create that entrepreneurial environment in our region. So why do banks shy away? There is a $260 billion gap in financing SMEs in the region. It must be a very lucrative business for you. And only 8% of the bank loan portfolio is to small and medium sized businesses. And it's only 4% in the Gulf. So you're at the lowest level in the Gulf. And yet you have a huge unemployment problem with your nationals. What's the problem? I mean, why don't you take risks on your entrepreneurs? So let me cover the first part. What do we do as a big company? And how do we foster entrepreneurship? So we're involved with many things. But you mentioned in JAWS. And that's a program that we're very involved with. And I've involved with it across the region. And JAWS now puts 400,000 youth through the program. And if you look at the sample set of people who go through the program. As opposed to sample sets of people who didn't. The level of entrepreneurship increases fourfold. So it really does teach these young people the skills and what's required to be successful in the private sector and to be successful entrepreneur. So that's one thing that we spend a tremendous amount of resources, a tremendous amount of time getting involved in. And trying to teach young people how to be entrepreneurs. The SME problem. I think you're right. I think banks should be doing more to fund SMEs. I'm happy to say that the bank that I'm chairman of Gulf Bank has just come up with the new SME funding program that we've done together, which is at first for the region, as far as I know, which is where we've done risk sharing with the government. Where the government takes part of the risk for the portfolio for the startup companies. And the bank assumes part of that risk as well. And the rationale we pitched to the government, and the rationale was we as a bank, if you put our money on the line as well, are better at choosing the credit risk than the governments are. Governments typically don't have good investment track records. But if you make the risk reward for us a little bit better by sharing some of the risk with us as well, then we're going to invest a lot more in this. And this is nothing new. This exists all over the world. But it's just re-implementing it. And now we've been running it for two months and I'm happy to say we're getting some traction on it. And then there's an innovative program that just came out from the government of Kuwait of availing two billion Kuwaiti dinars, that's $7 billion for startups and for... We're accessing that. And that's like... If it's available for the rest of the Arab world, we'd be very happy because $7 billion is a lot of money. So maybe we can get some of it here in the region. But we have some great entrepreneurs in Kuwait and hopefully we'll be able to make use of it. You would have no excuse from the entrepreneurship perspective. But Fadi, you think that, right? So you're going back to capital. But we did that survey and I told you the result of the survey. So it's not lack of capital, it's a number of problems. The number of problem entrepreneurs have is government regulations. That's the number of problem entrepreneurs have. It's not an issue that you need to throw money at. It's an issue that we need to make it easier for entrepreneurs to be able to go out there and work. In my company, I have over 200 people who deal with government regulations and bureaucracy. And so I have an unfair advantage. Young entrepreneurs don't have that. They need somebody. And so one of the things we're looking at now as part of the SME fund is setting up a mini-ministry in Kuwait for young entrepreneurs. They'll streamline things for young entrepreneurs. And rather than it taking such a long time, make it more of a meritocracy, not a worstocracy within the... And that's critical. And that pins down the responsibility of the private sector because we claim that to be powerful, we rub shoulders with ministers. So why don't we actually rub shoulders and lobby for the ease of this bureaucratic process? I mean, why don't we put our power, because we're so proud of it, into the use to ease that process? I think ultimately companies are comfortable with the position that they're in. Are we afraid? I think many companies are, but we shouldn't be. Because if we're afraid of entrepreneurs coming in, then what's going to happen is that we're going to have companies coming in from the outside who are going to eat our lunch. And the lunch is being eaten right now. So what we need to do is we need to make our markets more efficient and more competitive, because if we don't do that, then we as a region become uncompetitive. And we will lose our lunch taken by somebody else. And Dr. Mahmood, you come from Libya and the challenges in Libya are completely different than today, than they were before, and certainly than the rest of the region. And I'm going to maybe address a little bit of politics with you, but more relating to youth, so not addressing the problems in Libya. The biggest challenge, and I'll let you address any issue you want, but the biggest challenge I view in Libya and among the other troubled countries in our neighbourhood like Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, is a lot of our youth are holding guns today. For various reasons. That worries us all, obviously, but this is the biggest challenge because these are the future of our countries. How do we actually take away that process of being militants to being productive elements in society? And I know in Libya that's probably the biggest challenge. How do you lay down your weapons as a revolutionary if you want to call him that and then become a revolutionary in the economic cycle rather than a revolutionary with a gun? Well, thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. The issue of young people in Libya who turned militant and carrying guns today and some of them refused to give up those arms. I think it's just, Libya is just a case of point. Libya can be repeated in some other countries if we don't pay attention. The world has changed substantially and we are still doing things the old way. When we talk about SMEs, we talk about SMEs as a solution to a problem of youth. The youth are not a problem. They are the solution. I'm glad when I heard His Majesty this morning talk about Vision 2025 because that's where the whole thing starts. National economies in the Arab world, they don't have vision. Most of them and some of them manage to develop visions but they don't execute those visions. They are still in the shelves. The function of any vision is to position your economy within the context of the global economy and the regional economy so you know your competitive edge. At that point, you have an identity of your economy. Then you can start mobilizing your resources around that competitive edge where you pave your roads, where you build your schools, where you build your hospitals, where you plan your cities. It's all crystallized around that identity of the economy. In that sense, our youth can be trained, can be educated. Our scientific research can be geared toward that end and what we do is, in a sporadic sense, isolated islands. Every ministry works in its own. Feeling that we are doing something, spending budgets, but at the end we talk about GDP. Even in the entire economy, GDP is a function of getting oil from the ground and selling it. The real GDP is when the economy manages to create jobs. This is the real GDP. Today, I would argue that Daesh is the biggest employer in the Arab world. This is sad. Actually, it's the government. Which is the question I wanted to ask you. When we talk about education, we still talk about education in the industrial age. Today we move from access to knowledge to the management of knowledge because this explosion of knowledge is much higher and much bigger than any curriculum can contain. There is no single school in the whole world today that has been designed around the concept of management of knowledge. We have to manage complexity, we have to manage diversity, and we have to manage a flow of information. We are not trained to do that, but the new world is completely different. So if we need our kids to be a productive force in a new economy with a certain identity, we better revolutionize our thinking first. That we start by positioning ourselves within the context of the whole world. Two, developing the identity of our economy. Three, gearing our educational systems, our training system toward that end. In that sense, you will find that SMEs will be connected to mega projects. So they have the sustainability of a growth. But SMEs now just a painkiller, no more than that. And you can ask bankers the percentage of failure to pay the bank back. I helped SMEs in Egypt and Libya, no man, and I'm acquainted with the cases of failure. Simply because it's just a problem when I get rid of it. Keep them out of the street because if you don't keep them out of the street, then you're going to end up having what happened in Libya, in Syria, in Yemen, and in Tunisia and Egypt. So we better, because 67% of the Arab population, this is a real wealth and we are wasting it. We are afraid of it. We should embrace it instead. But how do we do that? I mean, you're a politician and you were a prime minister. How do we move away from aspirational thinking and all these McKinsey studies that come our way and others, and move them into implementation? What's the problem? I'm a constant conference goer and I hear constantly government officials telling us about their vision of what needs to be done. And in some countries it gets done. But the biggest challenge is moving from theory to actually practice and actually implementation. The success of our governments needs to be viewed based on implementation of what they say. What stops you from doing that? Is the bureaucracy too powerful and too complacent to actually take the vision of a powerful leader or a visionary leader and actually trickles it down to implementation? What did you face as a challenge other than the gun when you were a prime minister? Or when you were in the previous government during the different days of pre-Arab spring? No, we can't take the eight months when I was a prime minister as an example. Simply because that period was a crisis period. There was only a single objective of how to get rid of Gaddafi, how to get rid of the regime. No more than that. There was no time for planning and no time for visioning. Though before the regime was down, we developed a division called it also 2025. And I can't claim that it's one of the best visions developed because we looked at the Jordanian vision, which is by the way one of the best also because it was developed by an NGO and it was financed by a private sector. So the government was not even involved but the vision was a good one. The Emirati did the vision, the Qataris did the vision, the Egyptians did three visions, the Omani did the vision. The question is how to translate this vision into concrete plans and you measure up the execution and the progress achieved as a result of that plan every year. We don't do that. We just do a vision as a cosmetic thing. But why? Why does government have to give us cosmetics? It's a question when the big boss, the king or the president or the leader, whatever the title is, is convinced that he can pull this country because this is a time of crossing. This is a time of crossing. I mean if you look at Singapore or South Korea, Singapore started in 1965. All Arab countries were independent in 1965. But where is Singapore today? Singapore just few rocks in the sea. They don't even have water to drink. They do recycling. So the question is the vision of that leader, if he can trust a group of experts in his country and have this group of experts surrounding him all the time, listen to them, because I can put my money in this. The security of any regime today depends on the issue of development and the issue of inclusion. It's not security apparatus anymore. It's not armies. They did not serve Gaddafi. They did not serve Mubarak. And they did not serve bin Ali or Ali Abdullah Saleh. So what I'm saying, what took place in those four or five cases uprising, Arab uprising, this is just the beginning and we are having now some sort of a resists because what took place and the inclusion of Daesh, the insertion of Daesh to the scene. But I think as long as those structural problems we have in our economy, we have in our government, we have in our social systems and our cultural system to defeat Daesh or to defeat terrorism, it's a holistic approach. It's not a question of guns. You have to give those kids an alternative. And that's why you ask it how those kids can give up their arms. They give up their arms, give them an alternative. Make them feel that they are part of the future of their own country. Include them in the process. But if you are afraid of this and that, those people if they get educated, then they're going to be a threat to the regime, the security of the regime. The more awakening of the street, this is to know what I'm saying. The new age, the new paradigm is saying, knowledge is all over the place. You cannot prevent it. Ideologies are out of place. Boundaries are out of place. Even flags. Today, my kid can chat with anybody all over the world. No police in the world can prevent him. Not only this, our apparatus, security apparatus were built around the concept that even the oppositions, we know they're headquarters. So we can arrest them at any moment. Today, you have a virtual party. The guy who is in China and who is in the Emirates and who is in Libya and who is in Morocco, they are in one party and they are chatting. Place and time are irrelevant anymore. So it's a new world, but we are dealing with the old tools. And the solutions are always local. The solutions are there. Are always local, because we can't blame the virtual world. Let me go to Princess Carolina and then I'll get back with another round. Princess Carolina, your work is with Honour Wa. We all know the work of Honour Wa. We've been around, unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you're looking for decades now. How can we take the experience that Honour Wa has had specifically with education in Lebanon and Jordan and with Palestinian refugees and apply it to the massive challenge that we have with the youth that are coming to Jordan and Lebanon today that are probably a lost generation now because most of them are not even going to school. In Lebanon, there are more school children aged, Syrian school children, kids than there are Lebanese. The school system in Jordan and Lebanon cannot absorb them. So when we're talking about youth, how do we actually not lose that generation in the coming three or four years, because apparently the problem in Syria is going to take a while. Thank you for that question. Fortunately or unfortunately, it's unright celebrating its 65th anniversary this year, which means that the issue of the Palestinian refugees has been there for that long, even a little bit longer. So there are lots of lessons to be learned from that. Just to get back to your question, what can we learn from the work that Honour has done with Palestinian refugees during crisis situations? I'd just like to highlight a report that was issued by the World Bank last year that has indicated that the level of education that Honour provides under the circumstances that it provides the education to the children during conflict and other problematic periods is extremely high. Now, why is that relevant to your question? It means that during conflict, during displacement, education is seen by organisations such as Honour as one of the most important elements that we have to continue doing and providing, because looking at the youth and looking at providing good education to children is obviously providing hope for the children themselves, but obviously for their families as well. So what can we learn from Honour in the cases of the current crisis is that it is important and it is worth investing, especially that it's possible. So what I would urge in this case with what is happening now is really with the public-private partnerships that we're discussing in these couple of days is for the private sector also to help support the youth in the region through these institutions. How do you think they can do that? Well, by providing assistance either through knowledge, networking, financial means to those institutions that provide education. I just want to highlight, just continuing on that, education is one of the most important. I think everybody agrees it's not a difficult topic to discuss. What is difficult though is that once you've finished education and even if it's high level of education, we still need access to the job market. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges for Palestinian refugees these days. What can we learn from Honour again in the current crisis? We don't want to repeat that for the Syrian refugees. We don't want to repeat that for any other of the refugees. So integration as much as possible in the societies if we can. Integration to the job market giving people hope and dignity especially is crucial. And related to that is also investing much more in women. Young girls, UNRWA has all since 1960 had 50% female participation in schools which is also remarkable and that needs to increase and be sustained by the entire region. And to come back to a point that you raised earlier with my colleague here. What can be done in terms of women participation? We had a gender session this morning and we discussed that a little bit. I think what needs to be done there is that more men need to speak up for the participation of women. How? I mean what is it that we're not doing? You're not talking enough about it. We're not talking a lot what? Enough about gender. So it's a men issue relating to women? I think what the issue is is that many women talk about it and many women talk amongst themselves about it. But we would like to see more men talk about it. But let me ask you a question and you might not know it because you don't necessarily live amongst us. But what is it that you think does not get women to move from their college to a job? And then the 50% college graduates fall into 18% participation in the economic cycle. What happens? Why do you think there is that gap? Is it that there is a clear discrimination against employment of women? Or is it that women also, well they're home makers so that we don't want to underestimate the power of the necessity of choosing to be a homemaker? So that's a choice also. What do we do? What are we missing? What does Europe do? So why do you have higher participation than we do? A little bit higher. I mean the problems are the same worldwide. I don't think we can make a huge distinction. So societal change for sure. As I think was mentioned before as well, it's also just providing better work conditions. So more childcare provisions, flexible working hours, etc. But it's also just understanding why it's beneficial to have women to work for us. It's not just having a quota of 50-50, that's not the most important thing. It's also understanding what the benefits are of having a mixed board, let's say, at the CEO level. And that's one of the things that is a question of education, I think. Thank you. And I'm going to go back to ask everyone about the education. The ILO report from the World Bank tells us on jobs in 2013. It says the main focus of education systems continues to be the production of future employees for the public sector. This is a general statement by the World Bank that says education systems are producing people who are actually, their knowledge base is to work in the public sector. And the public sector in some countries is employing anywhere between 80 and 50% of the workforce. So that's, and then I want to discuss that story. I want to also go through and get you to comment on the recently published ASDA Arab Youth Survey. A couple of months ago it came out, a couple of questions that are of interest to us on youth. They asked a question, how concerned would you say you are about employment? Asking youth, ages 18 to 22. The answer came 81% I'm concerned. So youth are obviously concerned. And it's not only a general statement, it's also in the GCC where probably employment in certain countries are higher. It's 73% in the GCC. It's bigger in the, it's a bigger challenge in the Levant countries here in this part of the world. And then the next question says, how confident are you in your government's ability to deal with unemployment? So suddenly you plug in government into the process. How is government able to deal with unemployment? And the question in the GCC is 68% of the people of the GCC tell you we are very confident that the government is going to resolve it. And 61% in non-GCC countries. So while policymakers continuously tell us we don't want to employ people in the public sector, we want them to be employed in the private sector. So there is a question of misperception here. Even education systems are not giving the skills that are needed for the private sector. And then everyone that is not getting a job is telling us we think government effectively, we are very confident that government is going to resolve it. So there is, it's a paradox. What are the skills that are missing to employ people in the private sector? What do we do to change the education system to move it for employability, specifically in the Gulf? There is a big challenge of expatriates having the majority of the jobs and the nationals working in government. How do we change that formula? I think we need to overhaul our education system, that's for sure. But I think it's collective responsibility. So it's not just the government's responsibility. I think everybody should play a role in that. And I mean I heard this interesting story once about somebody who was interviewing candidates for a job. And he interviewed candidate after candidate and they were all non-suitable. And he decided to go to the university to ask them what kind of students they're producing. And they said, well, don't look at us, this is how we got them from school. So he goes to school and the school says, well, don't look at us, this is how we inherited them from middle school. You know where this is going, right? So he goes, don't look at us, this is how we got them from preschool. And he goes to preschool and he asks them, how come those students are not prepared for the job market? And they say, well, this is how their parents gave them to us. So actually the role is universal, it's collective. So parents have a large role to play, governments, the private sector, civil society. It's a collective responsibility. Why isn't it being done? I mean we all know that that's a problem. What's the missing link? Who is really not doing his thing to actually take it to the next level? Because the challenge in a digitized world is no longer a 21st century issue. The 21st century is moving at an accelerated mode that requires a revolution in the education system rather than a slow process of reform that effectively keeps us where we are because the world is moving much faster than we are. So we all agree, right, that we need critical skills for the 21st century. That's something that we all agree that we need. So that's something that's out there at the table. But we also need an entrepreneurial spirit. I think that's missing in our part of the world. And an interesting documentary that was made called the Lemonade Stories interviewed successful entrepreneurs and their mothers. And it goes to show how their mothers really influenced these people like Richard Branson, for example. And the culture at home and the parents influence onto their children actually determines whether they're entrepreneurial or not. And also, you know, not being afraid to take risks. That's something Amr pointed on this morning. And I think that's something that's missing in our part of the world. If we look at places like South Korea, and I think we spoke about that in Malaysia and Singapore, they invested in their people before investing in infrastructure. So they built their people first and then the people built their nation. So it's doable. It just takes time. And I think we need to work slowly at it. And we need the catalyst to speed things up. Amr, what sort of skills do you need or do you require in the private sector in your company, in your bank, to employ more of the graduates from your country? What is it that the education system is not giving them? And let me throw a bit of controversy here. There is a massive movement that says we need to protect our Arabic language and don't get excited. And we do. I also worry about that. But I also tell you, if you don't speak English, you're not going to get employed. And that paradox is another story altogether. So we want to protect our language. But employability means you need to speak languages, specifically English. You need to have computer skills. And you need to have other technical skills like critical thinking, solutions, thinking. Tell us. I think we need to stop looking at our ministers of education as places to put, you know, we need to start thinking about those places where we put our very best people. I mean, if you look across the Gulf, there's no teacher proficiency exams. So, you know, our KPIs are wrong. We're measuring the wrong thing. And you run a business funny. And you typically get what you measure. So if you measure the amount of desks, the amount of school buildings, that's what you're going to get. And we have a lot of desks, we have a lot of school buildings, and we have a lot of teachers. But we don't measure quality. And the touch point where you get the traction is the teacher that interacts with the kids. And unfortunately, we don't have KPIs around the quality of teachers. And I haven't seen that in any nation in the Gulf, at least. I don't know, broader than that. But in the Gulf, I can speak to that. And so I think that's one area where we really need to improve on the quality of the teachers that are interacting with the kids. But I still think there's a lot the private sector can do in order to skill kids up. Because it's easier to point to governments and say, hey, look, we're not getting the quality of the people that we need, so we can't employ them. But I think there's a lot of skills that we can, there's a lot of skilling that we can do as a private sector in order to be able to give people skills. So the Regional Business Council here at the WEF, we put a goal in to have 100,000 youth affected by the region, by the, yeah, the Honda Mantaquah. Right. And we now are already 55% of the way there. And we hope to get more than 100% of the way there by Davos. It's by just, by utilizing the bandwidth of people's organizations for training. There's a lot of bandwidth within the private sector. And how to allocate that bandwidth and use that bandwidth for training and do something about it. Because like you said, it's easier to sit there and diagnose a problem. And the problem is pretty obvious. But what do we do about it? And how do we as a private sector look at our responsibilities, our neighborhood, this is where we live, and how do we affect some change? And so there's, I think, a lot more we can be doing as private sector people in order to skill people, in order to help people. There's some great programs, some great NGOs out there that we can support. And our organizations can bring in more people at the great school, high school level, volunteers. Do we need to, don't we need to participate as private sector in the curriculum setting with government? I mean, is there something in Kuwait where you actually participate with the government in saying, here are the skills we need, and here's what we need you to actually teach our kids? Does that exist? Does anyone ask you, what is it that you want these kids to learn so that you can employ them? You're asking me a question that you know the answer to. They don't. No. And I personally haven't seen it anyway. No, I mean we haven't. And that's a big gap. I think that we also have a problem, Fadi, with our youth in that they lack imagination. Our entrepreneurs lack imagination. So I touched on a survey earlier on. And one of the questions we asked these 2,200 youth across the region was that if you could do any business, and you're guaranteed to succeed in this business, what business would it be? And one, two, and three were retail, something in retail, real estate, and F&B. And information technology was number five. And we even sliced it amongst the type of degrees that people had, with high school degrees, bachelor degrees, master's degrees, or PhDs. And it actually didn't shift much across degrees. So I think we need to have examples of entrepreneurs, people who have success, role models, like you Fadi, people who have gone out there and started up companies, and people who have gone out like the telebots of the world, people who have started up technology companies, and hold them up as role models, as opposed to the real estate developers and the retailers, because where we're going to create our next Google, where we're going to create our next Uber, is going to be around the technology space. And we need more role models around the technology space to have people try to emulate and try to head towards. Thank you. Dr. Mahmood, you've been involved in training for a good amount of your career, other than being a politician. I tried to research to discover what training you do. I couldn't figure it out, but I'm going to assume that you've been training public sector employees. Am I right? So why do you train public sector employees? I mean, what is it that they're missing? Are these people trainable so that they can move into the private sector? Is there that much of a big cultural difference between people that work in the private sector and the public sector that we're missing in here? Well, unfortunately, most of the public sector institutions, they train simply because they have budgets, no more than that. Oh, so they train because they need to spend the money? But there is no strategy to reform the public sector to make it more efficient. I'll give you an example. When a trainee comes back after he finishes a certain training workshop and he goes back to his work, if he even dares to try to implement what he learned during those two, three weeks, I mean, somebody would tell him just to be quiet. It's been like that for a while. They go for training because there is an allowance. They go for training because there is budget. And they go for training because it's good to do shopping, and sometimes you take your family. But I would say that Arab management from 1965 until today, the amount of billions which been invested in training is much more than anybody can think. And the state of Arab management today is much worse than it was before 1965. Why? Because the management at that time was inherited from a colonial period. There was still some systems. So colonialism was good? No, this is fishing in different waters. But I just want to go back to your question about education reform. I don't think it's only about education. Education is the last part of the whole picture. What I think we really need is restructuring the socialization process in our countries, the way we bring our kids in our homes, the media, the way we understand and interpret religion because in the absence of a progressive understanding of religion like the school of Ibarushet, what we have is the school of Ibn Taymiyah and what he's doing in our sites today. Then you have education because these are the four industries that produce values, the chief behavior and attitudes for human beings. You cannot have state-of-the-art education and the kid receiving the contradictory message from the media and from his parents at home. So there should be some source of compatibility between those four factories, producing the same skills, the same attitude, which should be compatible. The question at the end, do you want those kids to be on your side as a productive force to rebuild your country, rebuild your economy, or you want them to be part of Daesh in the future? Thank you very much. And that question comes to you, Princess Carolina. So what is it? So the Palestinians have suffered for decades and you have a whole generation of productive Palestinians that have graduated from honor school that are on the side of productivity, highly educated. Honor school are famous for having a very powerful education system. Even though they are refugees and refugees are normally angry and they should come out and actually be very angry while you have Palestinians all over the world building countries and being entrepreneurs and being very productive. What is it about that? I think there is a culture of education and seeing the importance of education very, very strongly amongst the Palestinians. So talking about the holistic approach, family really fosters the importance of education for their children. So they have invested a lot in that, not only the refugees. What the problem is, and I know we're not supposed to talk only about the problems, but the issue with the Palestinian refugees in particular is that the education is good. And I think we all try to see youth as a potential and not as a problem. And that's one of the emphasis that we really want to make. But if you don't end the occupation, if you don't end the blockage of Gaza, if you don't deal with the civil war in Syria, then there is very little that people with refugee status can actually do. And that is something that we collectively have to look into and not rely only on international organizations such as UNRAT to resolve. Thank you very much. And I'm going to get some questions from the floor. But before I do that, talking about resolving these issues, the Arab Youth Survey came out again with these conclusions for this year. It says, how do you feel about the future of your country? So talking about how do the youth look at their country? 63% of the youth, just because we talk about their problems, well 63% tell us they're positive. They are positive. They think the future of their country, 63% of them are positive. They're either optimistic, they're excited, or hopeful. That questions were quite positive. So youth apparently think more than we do, who are much above their average age, think that there is something that's happening. And then another question says on the long run, 67% of youth say our best days are ahead of us. So I mean they're basically saying today is not great, but 67% is ahead of us. 70% of those people are in the GCC. 57% are here in the Levant. So even among all the problems that we are facing in the region, we still see 50 majority of people still say they're optimistic. And 73% in North Africa think the future is ahead of them, that there is a positive element out there. And then most importantly here I think for this discussion, and then I'll bring out the questions, is there was a question that was posed. Do you intend to start your own business in the next five years? That's an important question, because everyone thinks people want to work in the public sector. 39%, which is a staggering number, say yes. So something is that these people have that hope and aspiration to actually start a business. There is a failure somewhere else to translate that into action. And then people decide to go into the public sector or actually don't start a business. But most of them are actually, 16% of these people want to be in high tech and 15% in retail. So there is a positive story here on the youth in the Arab world. And I will conclude with that. I will thank you all, but we have about five or six minutes for questions. And do we have a microphone anywhere here? Yes, we have a microphone. Questions. There's one here and there's one there. Excuse me, yes, yes, yes, yes. Don't be shy. And then the next one comes here. And then we'll take a couple of questions. No comments unless you really, really, really feel about it. You need to comment and then you have five seconds to comment. Definitely you have to give the opportunity to everybody to ask questions. Don't worry. No, we have five minutes, so I could, we could, you know... I'm Yusef Global Shaper from Robots in Morocco and I'm, thank you for such a discussion. So my question is related to educational system. If you have the opportunity and this question to everybody in the audience, if you have the opportunity to create a new education system that will allow young people in our region to grow, what kind of component you're going to put in such system. And if this system exists today, then please share it as well. Thank you. Please. Anyone can choose to answer. I think we need to stop looking at education as a competition and look at more as a collaboration because the skills that we need in the real world are collaborative and we're all trained in all of our educations to compete with each other and it's a competition between each other. And I think we ought to find ways to be, to learn how to be more collaborative and get those critical thinking skills but yet learn how to work together and how to get things done. Thank you. Does anyone feel that they want to say something? I just want to add quickly that it's so interesting to have the Global Shapers here and I hope maybe next year in the session to have them speak at the youth panel because we really want to hear from them actually. Okay, so next. You're also a Global Shaper. Another Global Shaper. You look like one. We all have the same look here. Really? From Tripoli in Libya. Mohamed Hamouda. From Tripoli in Libya. Yes. Yes. My question is about how we, what's your perception and thoughts about including social entrepreneurs as a solution for providing jobs? Can I turn the question to you and tell you what do you think we need to do with Libyan youth to put them in the productive side of society because you're part of the youth and the question is to you because I would have loved you to be on the panel with us. Okay. Go ahead. Tell us. You have one minute. Actually, I think the most important thing is inclusion and the inclusion in decision making and also in the process of analyzing the problems because one of the main problems we think that we know the problem but in fact the problems we don't know them yet. This is the first thing. The second thing is... So you need to be asked. Yes. Nobody talks to you. To be asked and to be involved. And the second thing is like learning by doing because lately UNDP has done a survey about the civil society mapping Libya and we realized that the number of civil society in Libya per people are more than our neighbors in Tunisia and in Egypt. So this was one of the... So the civil society running the country today? Well, we hope so. But in fact... That's a good answer. We are not. So this is one of the things. It's like learning by doing and also inclusion. Thank you very much. I think we will receive the right solution. Thank you. Next. We'll have the lady here. What? Awa? Awa. Yes. You're a global shaper. Yes. Okay. Where are you from? I'm Asma, a global shaper from Gaza Hub. So my question to you is that we have, like most of the panelists said, is that entrepreneurship and the focus on SMEs is the future because it constitutes a large percentage of the different countries. But my question to you, don't you think that it is dangerous to assume that entrepreneurship alone will be the future of the minor region and the way to solve the different problems that we are solving? And if it's not alone, what should be accompanied with entrepreneurship? So are you challenging the question that entrepreneurship is actually a solution, the only solution? Yes. So if it's not, then what do you think should be the solution? Exactly, and especially... Tell us. I want you to tell us. Okay. Just a minute. But first... No, I mean, because it's important that we hear you out. We were only giving you five minutes, and we're sorry for that as global shapers, but your voice needs to be heard. We are promoting entrepreneurship, but the question is that how many successes has been on entrepreneurship in the minor regions? And if we are looking at the success, how many failures has happened and what are the causes of the failures and how it affected the dreams of the young people who come up with the entrepreneurship dreaming that it is the solution, but we left them in a bad, in a worse situation than before. I do believe in entrepreneurship, and I want to start something called entrepreneurship sees, or Gaza sees through entrepreneurship program, but it's not alone enough. Are you involved with the Gaza sky geeks? Yes, I'm a mentor there. And it's a fantastic program. It is fantastic, but the point is that we bring these people, we talk to them about entrepreneurship, we give them training, and we give them seed funds, but after that, what happens? Occupation. Occupation? Yes, and also other things around. So we give them hope, but we leave them in midway. We don't support them the whole way. Thank you very much. Unfortunately, we are out of time, and we have to end here. Thank you very much. Panelists, brilliant.