Point of View

In a new opinion piece for Gulf News, Paul Dyer examines the role of mahr and wedding celebration costs in shaping marriage decisions among young people. He finds that, for a bride and her family, a groom’s ability and willingness to meet these costs provide a strong signal of his economic standing and commitment. This article originally appeared in Gulf News on 10 September 2010.

The Middle East Youth Initiative has released a new study that explores youth transitions in Iran in depth, exploiting longitudinal data to track youth preferences and outcomes as they move from the education system into the labor and marriage markets. Diana Greenwald interviewed coauthor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani to discuss some of the paper’s main findings.

On June 27, 2010, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released the 2010 Egypt Human Development Report (EHDR) entitled “Youth in Egypt: Building our Future.” On the occasion of the release of the EHDR, Mary Kraetsch spoke with Heba Handoussa, lead author of the EHDR, about the report’s goals and main findings.

Diana Greenwald interviews Raufa Hassan al-Sharki on the importance of human development and transparent governance in Yemen, with a special focus on the country's young women and girls.

In an effort to shed light on the challenges that youth continue to face in the Middle East, Samantha Constant and Mary Kraetsch have created an interactive map and corresponding fact sheets that provide key statistics associated with youth issues for all 18 countries in the Middle East. In the accompanying note, they provide an overview of the data and their main findings.