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The theme for International Youth Day this year is "Sustainability: Our Challenge. Our Future." International Youth Day is held on August 12 every year. It was endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1999 to promote awareness of the World Programme of Action for Youth (WPAY), a policy framework and practical guidelines for national action and international support to improve the situation of young people around the world.

By James D. Wolfensohn

No task is more urgent than providing hope to the 100 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29 in the Middle East.  If we provide them with the opportunity to lead constructive lives, they will build an exciting area of prosperity, stability and hope.  If they are frustrated and are unable to find work and build their families, there will be unrest, dissension and very possibly violence.

The National, a paper based in the UAE, has featured the Costs of Exclusion study and interviews with the author, Jad Chaaban, and Tarik Yousef, Non-Resident Fellow at Brookings and Dean of the Dubai School of Government, and Paul Dyer, Research Associate at the DSG, in a 4-part series.

"In the past eight years, Washington has viewed the struggle of Arab youth as political, theological and ideological,” Navtej Dhillon, director of the Middle East Youth Initiative at Brookings, described to Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National.

Middle East Youth Initiative expert Jad Chaaban was recently featured on Al Jazeera English’s Inside Story program to discuss recent developments in Middle East stock exchanges, where markets from Dubai to Cairo have experienced significant volatility.

Ehaab Abdou and Samantha Constant participated in a roundtable entitled “Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Egypt: Building Stronger Public-Private Partnerships for the Next Generation” hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, in cooperation with the Middle East Youth Initiative, on June 9 in Cairo.

The latest Middle East Youth Initiative working paper, Stalled Youth Transitions in the Middle East: A Framework for Policy Reform, enables regional governments to move from quick fix, piecemeal solutions toward holistic, sustainable strategies to promote successful outcomes for young people.

A good job should provide decent earnings and job stability. Emerging research by Ragui Assaad shows that the predicted quality of first jobs for educated youth in Egypt has declined precipitously.

MEYI Working Paper The Costs of Youth Exclusion in the Middle East and MEYI Director Navtej Dhillon featured on BBC Persia website and in BBC audio broadcast.

With regard to the little that was accomplished on the economic front by President Bush’s visit, Salehi-Isfahani says that the primary concerns in Arab countries are the economy and development, and that the best thing that leaders in the region can work for is the creation of job opportunities for the youth that make up a majority of the population in the states of the region.