Rising youth unemployment in the Middle East is a problem that can be fixed. Here's how

Everyone is facing change, but a whole generation of young people will bear the brunt of COVID-19’s economic fallout for decades to come.

This is a moment when successful companies and business leaders must present real and immediate solutions to help retool and retrain these young people to harness their talents and pave a new path forward.

Even before the pandemic, the fortunes of young workers were not faring well around the world. When global growth rates were rising, an estimated 70.9 million young people languished unemployed in 2017, bringing the global youth unemployment rate to 13.1 per cent.

According to the International Labour Organization, labour force participation rate of young people (aged 15–24) has continued to decline; young people are three times as likely as adults (25 years and older) to be unemployed.

This is partly because their limited work experience counts against them when they are applying for entry-level jobs. But there are also major structural barriers preventing them from entering the labour market, as the ILO outlined in the recently published Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020.

Globally, one-fifth of young people currently have NEET status, which means they are neither gaining experience in the labour market, nor receiving an income from work, nor enhancing their education and skills.

Young women are twice as likely as young men to fall into this category and the gender gap is even more pronounced in the Middle East, where social and cultural norms have in the past limited women’s educations or career goals.

Sadly, the ILO reports, target 8.6 of the Sustainable Development Goals, namely a substantial reduction in the proportion of NEET youth by 2020, is being missed. Even in the best of times, labour underutilization in the early stages of a young person’s career has long term effects on workers, including reduced employment opportunities and reduced earning potential decades later.

Add the COVID-19 pandemic into the mix, and the impact is even more dramatic. With most school-age and university students missing months of schooling due to the global lock downs, absence from education will have an impact on their earning power for decades.

A study conducted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans and other parts of the American south in 2005, found that five years after the storm, roughly a third of the city’s children had been held back, nearly twice the average in the rest of the South.

Another study cited by the New Yorker magazine recently found that the average seven-year-old in New Orleans at the time of Katrina was more likely to be “neither employed nor attending school compared to peers” 10 years later, dramatically impacting their earning potential in adulthood.

The challenges from COVID-19 are massive and they require everyone’s involvement, particularly business. We must all collaborate to ensure efforts to retrain and retool young people succeed and grow, for the sake of the next generation in our region and for the world’s future growth.