Queen Rania's Sustainability Group Meets on Youth Unemployment and Role of Businesses

Tarik Yousef, Dean of the Dubai School of Government and Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings' Wolfensohn Center for Development, took part in the second Arab Sustainability Leadership Group (ASLG) led by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah in Amman, Jordan on November 2 and 3.

The ASLG was founded by Queen Rania earlier this year; and has worked to encourage businesses to balance profit with environmental protection and equal opportunity. The group currently consists of twenty two representatives from some of the Middle East's most progressive organizations including private businesses, non-governmental institutions, and representation from the public sector as well.

On November 2 during the opening plenary session of the ASLG meeting, Queen Rania pointed out why youth employability is of major concern to the region. “With 60 percent of our population under the age of 30 and one out of every four are unemployed, we have to create five million jobs per year just to prevent a rise in unemployment,” she warned.

Panelists that spoke on this issue included Dame Cleverdon, Vice President of the UK based organization Business in the Community; Helmy Abouleish, Managing Director of Sekem in Egypt; and Tarik Yousef. The panel stressed that businesses have the capacity to lead the way in promoting social entrepreneurship and social innovation in educational curricula.

Dame Julia Cleverdon spoke about her experiences with a number of relevant initiatives in the UK that targeted homeless and unemployed youth and worked to reintegrate them into society by providing job opportunities and mentorship. Based on their tracking, the majority of the youth involved in the program successfully remained in the workforce for at least six months.

Her Majesty noted that in such cases business can come in and fill the gaps in the education system. Furthering on such sentiment, Yousef added that businesses have a moral obligation to provide a genuine alternative to government intervention to achieving social goals. “The private sector can demonstrate what works and what doesn’t,” he said.

Following the panel, attendees from the private and public sectors as well as the youth community, engaged in a lively brainstorm on how to best focus the private sector’s energy on youth employment issues and how to develop a relationship with government entities to help create the necessary framework for implementing some of the recommendations.

On November 3, the ASLG discussed ways to embed sustainability in an organization’s structure, how to lobby governments to improve policy, and ways to further advance the mission of spreading the sustainability ethos across the Middle East.

Queen Rania urged the members to keep up the meeting’s momentum as they return to their bases across the Middle East. She also encouraged the members to maintain their commitments to social equity and to focusing on youth employment and employability in the region, warning that these issues should not be abandoned during economic hardships.

“Issues like unemployment, climate change, and access to education don’t vanish in an economic downturn,” she said, “but addressing these issues can both spur growth and tackle long-term challenges because our economic, environmental and social systems are so interconnected.”