‘Youth must be empowered’
DUBAI: Governments and the private sector should not prejudge young people as inexperienced and incapable if they are to succeed in future-proofing economies, said experts on day one of the Knowledge Summit 2018, noting that the youth have a unique set of skills that are crucial to today’s rapidly changing world.
In the session entitled “The Youth: Leaders of Change towards a Knowledge Economy” Princess Sumaya Bint Al Hassan, Chair of the Princess Sumaya University for Technology; Mohammad Abu Rumman, Jordan’s Minister of Culture and Youth; and Syed Saddiq, Youth and Sports Minister of Malaysia, discussed how young people can be to be empowered to build the economy of the future today.
The youth have the capacity to adapt, innovate and disrupt markets, and so the barriers to their promotion should be deconstructed to enable them to advance based on merit and creativity rather than experience.
“They are the forces of change we are looking for,” Mohammad Abu Rumman told the session. “We need to build bridges of communication with them and give young people the freedom and opportunity to unleash their potential.”
In the past, youths in the Arab region were able to depend on government jobs, but this is no longer the case, so they need to be allowed to lourish based on their research, communication and creative skills, the experts noted.
“We will neither grow nor prosper unless we release and celebrate our collective human creative capacity, and to fulil our potential we must not leave anyone behind,” Princess Sumaya Bint Al Hassan said.
“The future belongs to our youth and theirs is the knowledge economy, which will inevitably deine our world in the years to come,” she said
During a discussion titled “The Role of Governments in Empowering the Youth and the Knowledge Economy”, Princess Sumaya spoke of the Jordanian experience in empowering youth, which make up 70% of the Arab world’s population.
“The foundation of our success is that we invested in minds before looking at the quantity,” Princess Sumaya said. “We mainly focused on how to attract the most able students. We are very selective in ensuring we have great students. Illiteracy is the biggest issue in a large number of developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere.”