24/04/2012 07:45 AST
A World Economic Forum roundtable co-hosted by Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) has ended with a call for action and radical change in the region’s mindset to create more jobs for the nationals.
Now more than ever, it is critical “to match employment, entrepreneurship and education prospects with the aspirations of young population” in the Arab world including Saudi Arabia, said Labour Minister Adel Fakeih, while speaking at the day-long roundtable.
Enumerating fresh initiatives over the past several months, Fakeih said the Ministry of Labor had “launched 12 initiatives for women employment.”
To this end, he said Hafiz program was a support program for job seekers, more for women as they represent a large segment on the rolls of the Hafiz program. He said that this major initiative provides job search support, job matching and basic training to more than a million young job seekers in the Kingdom.
The roundtable at SABIC Academy was attended by a number of high-ranking Saudi officials, WEF officials, top executives and newsmen.
Prince Saud bin Abdullah bin Thunayan Al-Saud, chairman of Royal Commission for Jubail & Yanbu, who is also the chairman of SABIC board, delivered opening remarks.
This was followed by an interactive session on competitiveness and job creation in the Arab world.
Prominent among those, who took part in different sessions of the event included Prince Saud bin Abdullah bin Thunayan Al-Saud, chairman of Royal Commission for Jubail & Yanbu and SABIC’s chairman, Muhammad Suleiman Al-Jasser, minister of economy and Planning, Borge Brende, WEF’s managing director for government relations; Ali bin Nasser Al-Ghafis, TVTC governor, and SABIC Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Mohammed H. Al-Mady.
Referring to the need to exert more efforts for job creation in the Arab world, especially in Saudi Arabia, Fakeih said the government’s vision for Hafiz was to host integrated services for job seekers, comprising job counseling, training and match-making with employers.
A major theme during the roundtable was the need for an increased readiness to take risks and less concern about the chances of failure. This has clearly become a key in the decisions taken by government, industry and civil society in the Arab world.
In his speech at the roundtable, Al-Ghafis said: “The human resources development and employment issues are extremely complex within the context of a single country and it gets more complicated when addressing them for a cluster of countries such as the Arab world.”
To this end, he said the population of the Arab world was estimated at around 360 million people, and it is by no means a unified economic entity.
“Even though, most of the Arab countries spend a considerable amount of their GDP on education, public spending on technical and vocational training is much lower than international benchmarks,” said the TVTC chief.
He pointed out that Saudi Arabia spent about 6.9 percent of the GDP on education, which is higher than the OECD average.
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