World insight: a homegrown academic workforce for the Gulf
News source: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/
Nations are constructs. Like any other structure they need building blocks to be sustained. Education is key to this process in particular for “young” nation-states such as the countries of the Arabian peninsula. Thrown into the international system suddenly in the early to mid-20th century, educational institutions play a key role in engineering an idea of what it means to be Omani, Bahraini, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Qatari or, more recently, khaliji.
The same political mechanism applies to indigenising the workforce. In particular, the smaller Arab monarchies, with national populations smaller than a large town, have been hard put to create a local labour force with the benefits of sustainable capacity building or national taxation (as opposed to capital flight overseas).
Until very recently, the Arab monarchies were almost entirely dependent on foreign labour in almost all aspects of their socioeconomic set-up, in particular in the higher education sector, to the detriment of the development of a national workforce. Once expatriates settled in and occupied jobs, it became that much more difficult for the younger generation to come through. This is one of the factors why unemployment rates have increased in all monarchies of the Arabian peninsula. As data from the World Economic Forum and the G20 indicate, the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have persistently high unemployment rates.
The highest number can be found in Saudi Arabia where unemployment is about 30 per cent. The political ramifications were obvious in the Arab Spring, which affected every country of the region, as I have discussed in my On the Arab Revolts and the Iranian Revolution. Youth unemployment is a powder keg in West Asia and North Africa and pretty much everywhere else in the global south. Throw in a good ideological match and it will cause another huge explosion.
Countries such as Oman and the United Arab Emirates have attempted to pursue constructive policies aimed at nationalising the workforce, including in the higher education sector, even before the political upheavals that have scarred the region. Policies dubbed “Omanisation” or “Emiratisation” have been introduced to diversify the national economies and to employ citizens in the private and public sector.
For instance, in Oman, the population is growing by about 3 per cent per year, and about 40 per cent of the population is aged 15 or under. About 600,000 pupils are enrolled in schools; that is about 15 per cent of the overall population of the country. They will enter the job market very soon and the Omani economy does not seem to be ready to absorb such staggering numbers. In the United Arab Emirates, the figures are equally alarming. As a response, several state-sponsored initiatives such as the Tawteen UAE, Emirates Nationals Development Programme and the Abu Dhabi Tawteen Council have been actively pursuing Emiratisation by training high school students and graduates in skills required for the labour market. In the educational sector, the efforts are particularly focused. Institutions such as the Emirates Foundation offer competitive research grants themed along the Emiratisation campaign. Read more >>