Youth unemployment in Arab states worse than pre-Covid years, report reveals

Youth unemployment in numerous Arab states has risen since the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, marking a significant setback in the region’s efforts to increase employment levels amongst the youth.

According to a report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), eight Arab states – consisting of Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen – have published higher unemployment rates last year in comparison to 2019, just before the global Covid-19 pandemic hit.

While that unemployment rate was numbered at 27 per cent five years ago, the rate in 2023 is reported to have been 28 per cent, which is equal to approximately 2.5 million people, or almost 4 per cent of the global total unemployed population of 64.9 million.

Exceptions to the trend included Oman, Kuwait as well as Saudi Arabia, which posted the largest decline in youth unemployment last year with the rate down 8.6 per cent, a significant decrease from 16.3 per cent back in 2019.

Defining youth unemployment as people not working who are aged between 15 and 24 years old, the ILO – a United Nations organisation – classed the Middle East as one of three sub-regions that are “critically high” in those unemployment rates, with the other two being East Asia and South-East Asia.

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The report also noted that Arab states posted the highest rate of youth not in employment, education or training (Neet) last year, with that category consisting of one in three young people, putting those countries under the ‘off track’ status – the rate posting no change or increase between 2015 and 2023 – as well as higher than 15 per cent.

Such a category is also inhabited by the regions of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, making a combination of those three regions’ rates amount to 33 per cent of the global youth population. According to the report, it means that a third of the world’s young people live in a country that is ‘off track’ in its progress to meet a target specified by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The report quoted Mia Seppo, assistant Director-General at the ILO, as stating that the youth unemployment situation “cautions us about the growing casualisation of work for youth and about the widening gap in the supply of young graduates and the number of suitable jobs available to absorb them”.

She further highlighted that it “is a clear message … on the urgency to do better to combat the circumstances of unequal access to opportunities and to effectively target actions to bring transformative change to disadvantaged young people.”

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