The not-so-silent majority

With young people at the forefront of seismic changes to the political landscape, the Annual ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey has never been more relevant.

For three years now, ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller has given a voice to the Arab world’s most important demographic through its Annual Arab Youth Survey. This year that voice has resonance and weight as never before.

Amid unprecedented changes to the region’s political landscape, the third edition of the Annual ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey concentrates on the political, financial and social needs of the region’s youth. Its scope has been expanded to capture the opinions of 2,000 young people through face-to-face interviews in 10 Arab nations, including, for the first time, Iraq.

The bulk of the fieldwork was carried out before protests swept the region -- as such, our findings serve as a vivid snapshot of the thoughts and feelings of a generation on the cusp of change. However, to better understand the implications of the unbelievable events of January and February this year, we went back into the field and interviewed 500 more young people in Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon and Jordan for a Survey Update. Their responses, make for fascinating reading.

And the reason for all this painstaking work?  It’s our way of offering a meaningful contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the future of the Arab world. At ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, we believe that public relations and communications is all about identifying the right audience and stakeholders, ascertaining their attitudes and perceptions and then creating a meaningful and effective dialogue. For any business operating in the Middle East, or looking to expand into this region, understanding youth is of paramount importance. They aren’t just future consumers – they are the present and the future.  For Arab Governments, communicating with their largest demographic is critical and unavoidable.

The Arab Youth Survey, then, is a value-added service that we provide not just for our clients, but for every government, business and the civil society in the region. We firmly believe in the value of “evidence-based communication,” and this study underlines our faith in the strength of this approach.  The survey is the largest of its kind of the Arab world’s largest demographic and fills a gap for good quality research in this important area.

To understand the future of the region, one has to understand the hopes and aspirations of young people in the Middle East.  Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have shown, just how important those hopes and aspirations are, and just how dangerous it is to ignore them.

The youth revolution in the Middle East is a game changer. In the short term, there will be difficulty in building democratically run institutions, which will take over from regimes that were really not accountable to their people. In the long term, freedom and democracy can transform the region slowly but surely into an emerging market of significance in the global economy.

The seismic events we have witnessed are a testament to the power of effective, targeted communications. Information technology played a critical role in providing a voice to Arab youth. While TV networks such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya that provided the minute-by-minute information and reports, it was the new social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that were brilliantly harnessed by Arab youth as tools to organise the protests on the ground.

The youth of the Arab world have been ignored for too long. For too many years, governments and international agencies have spoken of the problems young people face as either something abstract or something for the future. The past few months have demonstrated in the clearest possible terms that those problems are real, and that the future is here.

But amid the obstacles lie opportunities. A youthful population, with a global outlook, can be a driver of growth. Technologically savvy, politically aware and increasingly entrepreneurial, this generation, given the opportunity, can rise to the considerable challenges they face.

With the ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey, our vision is to create the most comprehensive study on youth in the Arab world to encourage meaningful and effective dialogue leading to a more inclusive Arab society. We began this project in the belief that no-one was listening to what this most important demographic had to say. Do they have your attention yet?

Do log on to our microsite www.arabyouthsurvey.com to get the full picture.

(Sunil John is Chief Executive of ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller, the Middle East’s leading Public Relations consultancy)