The poorest country in the Middle East, Yemen faces a host of development challenges including an impending demographic transition, high levels of poverty, and dwindling natural resources. In part II of our “Innovators and Thinkers” feature on Dr. Ragui Assaad, Dr. Assaad discusses the special context for youth economic exclusion in Yemen. His research will be released in a forthcoming Middle East Youth Initiative working paper.
Dr. Assaad has served as the Regional Director for West Asia and North Africa at the Population Council and is currently a Professor of Planning and Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Assaad is the co-author of “Youth Exclusion in Egypt: In Search of ‘Second Chances” (Middle East Youth Initiative Working Paper, 2007).
Read Dr. Assaad’s complete bio and listen to excerpts of the interview below:
Transcript:
1) “Yemen has several very distinct features. One is the fact that its demographic transition is still at the very early stage. Fertility rates are still very high, and will be persistently high for a very long time; so that the growth and number of young people will persist for a very long time to come. Whereas in Egypt and Syria, and most of the other Arab countries – with the exception of some of the Gulf countries – we are at the peak in terms of proportion of youth in the population, and things are going to get better starting now. In Yemen, you really don’t foresee any change and the number of young people is going to keep growing very, very rapidly all the way through 2050. So demographically, Yemen has a much bigger challenge.
The second aspect of Yemen is that it is still essentially an agrarian economy. Over 70 percent of the population is in rural areas, depending on agriculture and natural resources as a primary source of livelihood. That is not the case for most of the rest of the region, and that means that population pressures on natural resources are very significant in Yemen, particularly on water resources.
So what you see in Yemen is that there are not many problems of a transition to more modern patterns of employment and marriage, you still see a continuation of traditional patterns where young people are still marrying fairly early and getting into traditional agrarian modes of production in rural areas. Of course, in the urban areas within Yemen you do see a little bit of this “
waithood” phenomenon among educated young people, especially young men, as they are expected to join the formal sector and acquire housing, etc. They are delaying marriage more and more, but that’s a much smaller phenomenon that it is in other parts of the region.
The main challenge I think is the very dramatic demographic pressure on a very weak natural resource base.”
2) “Yemen has the largest gender gap in education after Chad and Niger, so it’s the third-worst country in the world when it comes to the gender gap and education. So, while in most of the rest of the region the education gap has closed quite substantially, in Yemen it still remains very large. So enrollment rates among young girls, especially in rural areas in Yemen, are very, very low and that is still a big challenge in the Yemeni context.”
