03 May 2017 Young Arabs have little faith that their governments will be able to curb the region's soaring unemployment rate and consider joblessness and extremism to be the biggest challenges they face going forward, according to the results of new survey.
The Arab Youth Survey 2017, carried out from February 7 to March 7 earlier this year, conducted 3,500 face-to-face interviews with Arab males and females aged between 18 and 24 years from 16 Arab countries.
Some 35 percent of the respondents picked unemployment as the biggest obstacle facing the Middle East, while another 35 percent chose the rise of the extremist group Daesh (Islamic State).
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Around half of Arab youngsters interviewed in the survey, which was commissioned by the ASDA’A Burson Marsteller public relations agency, said they were “very concerned” about unemployment and were not confident in their governments’ abilities to handle the joblessness crisis facing young people in the region.
Egypt had the highest level of respondents who were least confident in the government system to deal with unemployment, with 37 percent. For five years, the Arab world’s most populous nation of over 90 million has been battling a tough economic crisis that widened its budget deficit and slashed its strategic foreign currency reserves. There are 3.59 million unemployed individuals in Egypt as of the fourth quarter of 2016, according to official data.
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Some 49 percent of the survey’s respondents said they were not satisfied with the Arab education system’s ability to prepare students for future jobs. However, there was a higher dissatisfaction rate among youth in North Africa, the Levant region and Yemen, while there was more confidence among youth in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, a region that enjoys better political and economic conditions.
Eighty percent of the respondents in the GCC said they were satisfied with their countries’ education systems, compared to only 33 percent in North Africa and 34 percent in Levant and Yemen.
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The survey was conducted by international polling firm Penn Schoen Berland and included the six GCC countries of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Yemen and Kuwait along with Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestinian territories, Tunisia and Yemen.
Optimism is down
With concern over unemployment at the forefront, Arab youth are increasingly negative about the outlook for their countries, the survey showed. Some 52 percent of the respondents said they don’t think things are going in the right direction, down from 64 percent last year.
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The GCC also scored better than the rest of the Arab countries on this topic, with 85 percent of its residents saying they think their countries are going in the right direction, a percentage that went down to 51 percent among residents in North Africa and 14 percent in the Levant and Yemen.
While 71 percent of the survey’s respondents last year believed that their best years are still ahead of them, only 58 percent this year believed the same sentiment, according to the survey results. Sixty six percent of the respondents in the Levant and Yemen thought their best days were behind them, compared to 33 percent from North Africa and only 21 percent from the GCC.
While 82 percent of the respondents from the GCC saw the economy going in the right direction in their countries, only 21 percent and 47 percent agreed with such an opinion in the Levant and Yemen together and North Africa, respectively.
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Overall, 81 percent of respondents from across the region felt their governments need to do more to address their needs, with the GCC and North Africa leading by the exact same percentage of 85 percent each, while Levant and Yemen followed with 71 percent.
Despite the relatively high economic conditions in the GCC, the oil-rich region was badly impacted by the slump in oil prices that started in mid-2014. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter of oil, reported a record budget deficit of $97.9 billion in 2015.
