Press conference on Alliance of Civilizations Youth Employment Initiative

Four Arab countries -- Bahrain, Qatar, Syria and Yemen -- are to serve as pilots for Silatech, a new $100 million youth employment initiative supported by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, said Shamil Idriss, Acting Director of the Secretariat for the Alliance, at a Headquarters press conference.

Mr. Idriss said the initiative was established by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development to create jobs for young people in the Arab world.  In particular, it aimed to connect young people, particularly first-time job seekers, to networks of employers and business partners and, at the same time, provide them with practical, ready-to-use support to build their skills and their access to capital.

The initiative, initially focused on the Arab world, was intended to expand to other regions in later years, he added.  It had developed out of the Alliance of Civilizations process over the last couple of years and would be the focus of a Summit taking place in Doha from 1 to 2 June.  Silatech, an Arabic word which means “your connection”, was first launched at the Alliance of Civilizations forum in Madrid in January by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Misnad, First Lady of Qatar, together with the Emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani.  Sheikha Mozah made a contribution of $100 million towards its establishment.

The initiative was developed to address the growing problem of youth unemployment, which was a particular priority in the Arab world, he continued.  The World Bank estimates current unemployment among the region’s youths aged 15 to 24 years at 25 per cent, with the level in individual countries ranging as high as anywhere from 37 per cent to 73 per cent.

He said that Silatech had developed a three-pronged strategy to address the problem.  The first prong would aim to advance policy changes in the pilot countries to better meet the needs of first-time job seekers and budding entrepreneurs.  It would use the support of high-profile partners, including the Dubai School of Government, the Brookings Institution, Gallup International, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Bank and the American University of Beirut.

The second prong, he added, would support skill-building, using a number of corporate partners, including Nike, and would also enable access to capital through the support of a consortium of banks, including HSBC and Standard Bank.  The third prong would focus on helping spark and enliven the entrepreneurial culture and spirit in the region through a number of outreach, media and other efforts.  The aim would be to spur young people to take advantage of opportunities that Silatech would be helping to establish in the pilot countries.

He said that the High Representative of the Alliance of Civilizations, Jorge Sampaio, would take part in the two-day Doha Summit and would host the opening dinner on 1 June, where some major commitments were expected to be made by the partners and participants attending.

The Summit, he added, would to bring together influential regional and global leaders from the private sector, the public sector and civil society along with leading personalities concerned with the growing youth unemployment challenge and interested in finding ways to unlock the potential of young people in the Arab region and beyond.

In order to strengthen and broaden Silatech’s support base, the Summit would also feature announcements of high-profile partnerships and commitments, he said.  Those would include an announcement by Cisco of the creation and launching of a major new technology platform providing a network of virtual contact centres across the Arab region via mobile phone, Web, print and television, which would allow young people access to information and skill-training opportunities, career counselling, job placement, business development services, market supply chain and small- and medium-enterprise financing opportunities.

The World Bank partnership for youth investment would also create a multi-donor trust fund to support investment to scale up effective youth employment and entrepreneurship initiatives across the region, he said.  The Bank would also provide loan guarantees and other financial products to encourage banks and other financial institutions to create youth friendly financial products, policies and practices.

For its part, he said the Mohamed Bin Rashid Al Maktum Foundation, which was launched a few years ago with a $10 billion initial endowment, would help conduct joint planning and alignment of strategies and would help roll out joint country plans in the pilot countries in order to maximize impact.  The Foundation was also co-funding the launching in the Silatech pilot countries, as well as various regional initiatives, Mr. Idriss added.

Another commitment, made by the Financial Times Stock Exchange, would help unlock investment capital by promoting the establishment of small and medium-sized enterprises across the Arab world, he continued.  It would support individual exchanges in establishing a small-and-medium-enterprise market and would create an index covering all small-and-medium-enterprise markets in the region, thus promoting such companies and markets worldwide and providing access to capital.

Together, he said the partners would help foster a new spirit of entrepreneurship among young Arabs and jump start the process of job creation in the region, particularly in the pilot countries.

He said that the significance of the Silatech initiative lay in the high level of cooperation it enjoyed between entities based predominantly in Muslim countries, on the one hand, and those in the West, on the other hand.  Such cooperation was the priority issue for which the Alliance of Civilizations was established.  The initiative also enjoyed cooperation across sectors, which the Alliance’s success had sparked from the beginning between corporations, Governments, think tanks, and media entitles.  In addition, there had been strong intra-Arab cooperation, which was fairly rare.

A second significant aspect of the initiative was its practical aspect, he said.  Since its establishment in 2005, there had been questions about whether the Alliance could generate practical initiatives to address real-world problems.  The issue of youth employment, particularly in the Arab world, was one of the most daunting challenges facing the international community today and the initiative represented a highly pragmatic approach to address it.

In response to a question, he said that a lot of the youth who had expressed interest in taking advantage of the initiative were young women, including many from Qatar.

To another question, he said that the Alliance was not going to manage Silatech, but was, instead, playing a facilitator role.  The project fit into the Alliance’s mandate, since one of the major areas of action highlighted in the report to the Secretary-General in 2006 was the issue of youth.  Within that, youth employment had been particularly noted as a serious challenging issue on which international cooperation and cooperation between entities in the West and predominantly Muslim countries could make a big difference.  The Alliance played a role in generating the idea for the initiative, which came out of the deliberations of the high-level group.

He added that Silatech was focusing on the Arab region in the initial stages, because that was the region of the greatest need in terms of youth unemployment.  The focus also had to do with the primary source of support for the initiative, as most of that support had come from Sheikha Mozah.

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For information media • not an official record