Governments in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan (MENAP) region need to prepare for a surging youth population that will need to be prepared to find jobs as automation will make millions of today’s jobs obsolete, a new report from consulting company McKinsey has found.
Over the next two decades, around 127 million young people are expected to enter the region’s labour force, but nearly 29 million jobs, about 17 percent of current jobs, are at risk of being displaced by 2030 because of automation, and Covid-19 has only accelerated this, the report said.
“MENAP governments will not find it easy to create jobs for this rapidly expanding working-age demographic,” the Opportunity Youth report said.
Average unemployment in the region is estimated at 9.2 percent – higher than the global average of 5.4 percent – according to International Labor Organization data.
If governments can adapt to address these challenges, the region could witness an additional economic output of $197 billion by 2040.
Increasing early childhood education enrolment, and reskilling and upskilling the existing workforce need to be areas of focus.
To increase enrolment, Mckinsey said that: “Governments in the region could provide financial and regulatory incentives to help increase ECE enrolment, with success shown in many other countries. This includes vouchers or tax reductions for parents, and various incentives to reduce the costs and increase the supply of care centres. We explore the range of measures that countries have at their disposal to raise the availability and quality of early childhood education.”
And to reskill workers, countries could adopt a system where employees receive credits to use with authorised education providers.
“Countries have two potential methods of funding learning credits: funding citizens directly through accredited providers, and collaborating with large companies to fund the reskilling of their workforces,” the report’s authors wrote.
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