Friday, October 22, 2004
The spotlight reveals a region that has tremendous wealth and natural resources and that reflects considerable progress in many areas - in infrastructure, in increasing market capitalization, technology and wealth.
This progress, however, fails to incorporate many of the fundamental changes that are key to our development and competitiveness and the ability of the Arab world to take its rightful place on the world stage, those changes being the improvement of our educational systems, the creation of job opportunities for our young men and women, a sense of a common purpose and a common destiny, and the development of a stronger sense of engagement and social responsibility.
We cannot have those or any other changes forced upon us or dictated by others. While we can no longer continue to pretend that we can have progress without real change, we cannot embrace change that does not take account of our values and traditions. Real change must come from within, and it can only come from within if people are properly educated, perceive that they have choices and opportunities, and accept that we are all responsible for and have a duty to each other.
Both we in the business community and our governments also need to change the way we think. The purpose of our investments and the guiding principle of our economies cannot simply be to make the rich richer, with an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. That is an issue, by the way, that is not unique to the Arab world. Consider the following:
The richest 1 percent of the world's people earns as much income as the entire bottom poorest half. The world's three wealthiest families have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 600 million of the world's people. Three billion of the world's people, almost one half of the world's population, live in poverty and earn less than $2 a day.
The economic, political and social implications of this are all intertwined and cannot be ignored, especially in the Arab world. No Arab, whether based in Riyadh or Manama or Amman or Gaza or here in New York, can afford not to care, not to question why we are in this predicament and not to ask what must be done to improve our situation. We in the private sector can no longer sit back and expect our governments to take care of us. We must assume responsibility.
What does that entail?
It means that we must work with our governments to foster and support educational systems of the highest quality and to define the appropriate academic and technical skill sets that will bring our educational curriculum into line with the demands of the 21st century workplace and enable us to be competitive in the region and the world.
It means that we must adopt and adhere to a system of meritocracy, so that a man or woman gets the job and position for which he or she is best qualified.
It means that we must become good corporate citizens and lead by example - in every hiring decision, every investment choice, every commercial transaction, and in every report to our board, our shareholders, and our regulators.
It means that we must act as responsible citizens in providing honest feedback and assistance to our governments in relation to their efforts to effect programs of reform.
And it means that jobs and career opportunities must be created and open to women, as well as men.
And we have to do these things now. Take Saudi Arabia as an example. Our birthrate exceeds 3 percent, and 60 percent of our population is under the age of 20. Our unemployment rate is somewhere between 9.6 and 12.5 percent, and climbing, and that does not take women into consideration. If we do not create jobs for men and women, the gap will widen even more, and the resulting resentment and poverty will strain our social fabric to the breaking point.
While these challenges are considerable, they can be addressed. Actually, one of the major challenges facing Saudi Arabia, our large and youthful population, can if handled properly be turned into an asset.
A good example of what can be achieved - and hopefully replicated in other sectors of our economy - is what was done in an industry close to Arab Bankers Association of North America (ABANA) heart - our banking industry. The banking industry in Saudi Arabia is actually a very good example of how leaders in both the private and public sector identified a need, developed an approach, and did much to address some of the problems and challenges that I have described.
Bankers and officials at SAMA recognized the need to properly train Saudi bankers, so they focused on creating the proper technical training system to give young Saudis the appropriate skill sets needed for them to play a real role in the development of the banking sector.
The government worked with local banks to develop training programs and to establish the Institute of Banking, and also both funded training abroad. The banks then adopted a genuine system of meritocracy, as a result of which young Saudis were able to come through the ranks, prove themselves, and assume senior positions of responsibility at several of our key financial institutions, at Tadawul (our share trading system),
and at the recently formed Capital Markets Authority.
More importantly, these opportunities now apply to men and women - you would be hard pressed to walk into the corporate finance department of several of our banks and not find Saudi women playing a key role in, and occasionally leading, a project.
This is real progress and real change.
We should also not forget, though, that it took the West quite some time to provide women with the same rights and opportunities as men, including the right to vote.
Compiled by Daily Star staff
© The Daily Star 2004
