KUWAIT CITY: More than 30 per cent of young Arabs are jobless because of unrest in many Arab nations and not enough investment, a top labour official said on Sunday.

“The unemployment rate among Arab youth until the age of 30 years exceeds 30 per cent,” the director general of the Arab Labour Organisation Ahmad Mohammed Luqman said.

“Unrest and a lack of investments have boosted the number of jobless”. He said many graduates fail to find employment because their specialisations are not needed by private sector.

“Due to unrest in several Arab nations, the number of Arabs without jobs has jumped two million since 2011, making the total number of unemployed Arabs at 20 million,” Luqman said on the sidelines of the annual Arab labour conference.

He told the opening session of the five-day gathering in Kuwait City that unemployment in the Arab world hit 17pc last year, “three times higher “than the global average.

“It appears that jobless numbers will rise this year and the next,” Luqman added, without providing specific figures.

Published in Dawn, April 20th, 2015

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