Kuwait is Prioritizing Youth Development – Exclusive Interview with Dr Yousef Al-Ibrahim (Al Diwan Al Amiri)

Interview with Dr. Yousef Al-Ibrahim, Economic Adviser at Al-Diwan Al-Amiri, Minister’s Degree

What are the major projects that Kuwait is working on when it comes to empowering the younger generation?

The composition of young Kuwaitis in our society is very large. Nowadays, the new developments in social media, communications, and education have given the youth a power, not only in Kuwait but all over the world. With the vision of His Highness the Emir, quite a long time ago Kuwait started to pay a lot of attention to the youth and tried to help them get on the path to be a positive power in society instead of a destructive power in society. Mainly through the Amiri Diwan, we started to be catalysts for many projects. Within the Kuwait Foundation for Advancement of Sciences (KFAS), we established a very important centre called the Sabah Al Ahmad Centre for Giftedness and Creativity. They truly try to help young Kuwaitis, especially between the ages of 8 to 10, to discover their capabilities and ingenuity in science and math. I would love for you to visit the new academy for the gifted students, which was opened this year. It is in cooperation with KFAS and the Ministry of Education, and we are bringing more than 120 students from the sixth grade to the eighth grade into one building where they are taught a different approach and we try to accelerate their knowledge with special teachers to teach them. This is one project we have.

The second project was the National Youth Project in 2013, where we worked for one year asking all the NGOs in Kuwait to nominate two to five young members, be it in the economic society, the accounting society, the graduate society, the environment society and so on and so forth. These young Kuwaitis met and they started an approach to communicate with the rest of the youth to identify their priorities in the society and their environment particularly in education. They met Ministers, MPs, and the decision makers. They did research and they came up with a fully-fledged document with recommendations on these areas. It was submitted to His Highness the Emir who looked at it in detail and asked the prime minister and the government to start to look into these recommendations and start to implement them. Then the council of ministers formed a subcommittee of ministers and of members of this youth group to follow up on the adaptation of these recommendations and so many things came out of this. The first was the Ministry of Youth which is one of the first ministries in the region that is only concerned with youth affairs. Second was the National Fund for Small and Medium Businesses with a capital of 2 billion KD, which is about 7.5 billion US dollars. They also started to identify some young Kuwaitis to assume responsibilities within certain advisory councils like the Council of Planning and Development where we have three young Kuwaitis who are now members when usually it was limited to few retired ministers and businessmen. Now they have young blood and fresh ideas.

Kuwait’s Ministry of Youth is one of the first ministries in the region that is only concerned with youth affairs.

I can go on and on about so many projects. For example, there is Dr Fatma Mousawi, she is in charge of one of the programs called KAFU, which is a very important project where we are developing a database and a virtual gathering for young Kuwaitis in different fields. We are helping them to identify each other and their interests and fields of work. This will really help them in their careers and help to direct them and also to create interest among groups because Kuwait is now becoming a huge country with a population of 4 million, so you need to communicate and build these relationships. We are trying to build these clusters, for example of photographers, small businesses, environmentalists etc.

As we know, Kuwait is running a budget deficit so there is a great need to finally diversify away from oil. Some say the deficit could last until 2025.

That is a possibility but oil prices are very difficult to predict because it involves so many variables, some of them are economic variables and the rest political and social variables. Regardless of this, Kuwait has been trying very hard and I hope this time it will be more serious about diversifying the economy and to become less and less dependent on oil. To do this it will take a lot of work, convincing people especially. As we are a democratic country, we have a lot of institutions so there is an institutional process, it is not a one man show, you cannot just decide to increase fees or increase or remove subsidies. It is more complicated than that which is good in a sense as everyone has a voice to be heard but one has to be very careful in planning the future path of Kuwait; especially as we talked earlier about the composition of young Kuwaitis in society, these people are coming to the job market and now we have about 20,000 young Kuwaitis entering the labour market compared to 3,000 ten years ago or 500 during my graduation days. This is a snow ball that is growing and one has to be very careful when dealing with it. Of course the solution is not employing them in the government sector because that is the worst scenario. I think the solution is encouraging them to start their own businesses through the Kuwait Fund for SMEs or through encouraging them into the private sector to work in certain industries, mainly productive industries. This requires a lot of prerequisites; one is to improve your education system, as well as changing social behaviour and values. It is not bad to work in a factory, you don’t need to work a desk job but you can work in a factory. Also you can use technology. The future of any economy is using technology and embracing technology for all economic activities. Another challenge is to try to be less dependent on foreign labour, especially skilled foreign labour which you see all over the country. These are real, serious challenges and the more the oil prices continue to be low, the more serious action will need to be taken.

In which sectors do you see the biggest growth and most opportunities for investments?

The most promising investment in Kuwait would be in education, food processing, IT, renewable resources and maybe trade, particularly exports. In diversification you have to develop industries that produce tradeable goods. You don’t want to develop what they call “Dutch disease” where societies like the oil exporting countries started to develop non-tradeable industries and these non-tradeable industries are only local. You need to develop tradeable goods and industries that can be exported and bring in foreign currencies and so on and so forth with China, Singapore, the UK etc. These may be the sectors that need to be developed. Kuwait can also do a lot with financial services especially with Islamic financial services.

FAIR USE POLICY
This material (including media content) may not be published, broadcasted, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the page (including the source, i.e. Marcopolis.net) is permitted and encouraged.