September 8th, 2002

Mrs. Mubarak said opportunities must be provided for the immense energies of youths to be steered into the persistent activities of construction, The youths beeing the key propellers of the change process.

    Addressing the first International Youth Employment Summit (YES) hosted by Egypt at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) conference centre, she wondered how to ensure sustainable livelihoods for a generation of young people who are coming of age in the era of globalization and the knowledge based economy.

    Ignoring this problem is to our collective peril. "The enormous energies of youth must be given the opportunity to be channeled to constructive and sustainable activity," Mrs. Mubarak said.

    "If denied, we face the specter of hundreds of millions of half-educated unemployed youths in the cities of the developing world... easy prey to social pathologies, a social and political time bomb waiting to explode the order and stability from which they have been excluded," she added.

    "It is most appropriate that this meeting is taking place right after Johannesburg, where leaders of the world joined thousands of development specialists and activists to map out the course we have to follow if our dreams of a better world are to have a chance to become a reality," the first lady expounded.

    "Forests, water, cities, pollution, are all important issues. But in the end sustainable development is about people. And who of all the people are more deserving of our attention and care than our youth, who embody half the present and all the future," she said.

    "And for that we meet here to welcome the representatives of dozens of national youth networks who have come together to map out the course of their future," she further added.

    "Today we meet under the banner of the five E's...Employment, Employability, Equity, Enterpreneurship and Environmental sustainability. Let me say a few words about what each of these words mean to me," she said.

    "As we move into the world of the electronic revolution and the knowledge-based economy; as globalisation forces upon us new challenges and new competitive pressures; as technology and trade open new opportunities before a whole new generation, it is essential that we ensure that youth are adequately prepared for this new world. We cannot confront the challenges of tomorrow with yesterday's skills," the first lady stressed.

    "That is what employability is all about. It calls upon our educators and our institutions to show unprecedented imagination and vision. To trust our young people to learn to educate themselves. To transform our institutions of education and training to what befits the new times, focusing on socialization, teaching and skills, but also imparting a worldview that embraces the new, opens up to the other, and rises to the challenge of the untried," she underlined.

    "Today we have a billion young people in various stages of education and training system. They enter a labor force that will challenge them much fiercely than their parents were ever challenged.

    The drive of technological change is so fast, so farreaching and so pervasive that constant training and teaching will be the norm," she said, adding that this will require an unprecedented degree of collaboration between employers and training institutions and the formal education system.

    "It will require that our curricula be changed to emphasize learning to learn, and to impart a degree of self-confidence to youths who are embarking on the journey of their lives. It will require that the institutions of learning in society become more flexible and diverse in their offerings to accommodate the needs of lifelong learners in this age of the knowledge-based economy," Mrs. Mubarak expounded.

    "Young people will also have to take charge of their own education and continuing self-education. They will learn to seek out the opportunities and respond to the challenges, not await the government's initiative. Youth should increasingly be the drivers of change, not those who suffer the results of change," she said.

    "Employment will mean something different to the next generation . It will involve many components, and self- employment and continuous education will be an integral part of the new job markets.

    How will we cope with these challenges ? How will community action, small business ventures, micro-enterprises flourish in this globalising world ? That is a challenge we must address in these coming days of discussions and dialogue, where employment creation will be the watchword of one and all," she added.

    "It is important to note that massive efforts at helping tiny enterprises can yield more employment opportunities than massive investments in a few large schemes. India has successfully displaced the United States as the world's largest daily producer, by organizing hundreds of thousands of small farmers rather than investing in a few large so-called modern daily farms," she said.

    "In so doing, they created employment for all these poor farmers who would be otherwise gradually squeezed out of productive employment. In the United States itself, from hi-tech to services, it is the small sector where the largest number of new jobs are created, not in the 500 largest corporations listed annually, where mergers and changes frequently result in reducing employment," added Mrs. Mubarak.

    "When we talk of small business ventures and youth oriented projects we do not just mean subsistence farming... we are talking about future microsofts as well," she said.

    "Equity is not just about technology, and access to information and the digital divide, important as all that is. It is also about people. We are not all created equal, nor, regretfully, does society treat us all fairly.

    Equity demands that special attention be given to the needs of young women, whether in education or when entering the laberes force for the first time, and who in many parts of the world still suffer from discriminatory barriers," Mrs. Mubarak pointed out.

    "Remember that no society has truly advanced by depriving itself of the talents and abilities of half its population. Women represent 60 per cent of the world's illiterates, and despite many worthy efforts, girl enrollments in schools still trail boys in many parts of the world.

    Yet everyone today agrees on the enormous returns that societies get from investing in the education of girls and the empowerment of women. An educated young woman has the skills, the self-confidence and the information she needs to become a better parent, worker and citizen," stressed the first lady.

    "Empowering women with access to credit, to job opportunities, to appropriate ongoing training will bring enormous benefits to them and to the society as a whole," she added.

    "A sense of fairness also requires us to pay special attention to the rural world, even if the pace of urbanization is picking up everywhere in the developing world," she said, adding that rural youths still constitute the majority of the poor youths in the developing world and are likely to remain so for the next decade.

    "Rural non-farm employment opportunities must be developed apace with the conventional farm-based agricultural employment.

    Micro-credit schemes, which predominantly tend to focus on women, have succeeded. Examples from Bangladesh to Bolivia, from Egypt to Ecuador and from Malaysia to Mozambique have all proven that such outreach is feasible. Let us learn from these vanguard experiences," she further added.

    "Entrepreneurship is about seeing opportunities where others only see problems. Entrepreneurs, whether working in the village or in the capital markets, are the visionaries who generate opportunities for livelihoods for themselves and others. We need to encourage them, to nurture them and to support their quest for the new and the untried," Mrs. Mubarak further said, adding that entrepreneurship involves both social and economic aspects.

    "Those whose actions transform social contest are as important as those who act as generating investment. Both ultimately overcome barriers and create opportunities for youth employment and self-employment. Entrepreneurship can be nurtured through special training, emphasizing risk assessment, management and communication skills," she added.

    "It can be nurtured through bringing together the young entrepreneurs with their ideas and their dreams together with the potential venture capitalists or financial institutions in what have been aptly called innovation market place.

    In this conference hall we will also be providing one example of a market place, when donors from the rich countries will meet with youth groups from all over the developing world to discuss their ideas and experiences," the first lady pointed out.

    "Here in Egypt we nave a notable and very promising example worthy of note : The Future Generation Fundation (FGF). It demonstrates what civil society can do. It trains young people to ensure that they have the requisite skills for today's highly demanding labour market.

    In doing so it does not limit itself to local issues but recognizes that the global market place of tomorrow requires exposure to global training content," she said.

    "It ingintes in them the entrepreneurial spirit and mobilizes established businesses to nurture them into their transition to work.

    Further, it arranges internships for tomorrow leaders, and provides monitoring for the young start-ups. Finally, it is important that we should be looking for such employment opportunities in areas that promote environmental sustainability: It would be shortsighted to destroy our environment in the quest for illusionary employment opportunities," expounded Mrs. Mubarak, stressing that the conference will be discussing many innovative and encouraging examples in this area.

    "At the outset, I had mentioned that youth unemployment, if not properly addressed, would be a major threat to social harmony and political stability around the world. We hope through this conference to make a contribution to that critical issue in a constructive manner, a manner that is results oriented, that is based on sharing of knowledge and promoting mutual understanding," she said.

    "Though concrete actions, we hope to promote a peaceful and prosperous world where each will find his or her place as a productive citizen. Yet many of our recommendations and prescriptions cannot themselves be implemented in the climate of war and severe civil strife that plagues so many parts of the world.

    Without peace there can be neither socio-economic development nor environmental conservation. Our youth are pressed into becoming warriors rather than builders," she further said, stressing that all our aspirations for a better world are shattered, all our hopes for a better future are destroyed when the scourge of war and civil strife take over.

    "Whether between nations or within nations war, killing and destruction will inevitably accompany oppression and the denial of fundamental human rights. The promotion of peace remain our fundamental duty, each to act on it as they can.

    It is therefore essential that we truly place our efforts in this greater context, that we recognize the search for employment opportunities for our youth as an integral part of the search of human rights," the first lady added.

    "Human rights must include the dignity of work and the right to equal opportunities. No obstacle should be allowed to stand in the way of these goals. The world needs the talents and abilities of all its youths, regardless of race, creed, gender and national origin," she stressed.

    "So as we meet today to discuss the many interlined issues that make up youth employment, we are encouraged by the long lead up to this meeting. Literally thousands of young people and hundreds of experts have been meeting, not to prepare learned documents about what failed.. but to identify what works with youth themselves in the vanguard," she said, adding that youth then organized themselves into country networks, sharing experiences, confronting problems and daring to dream and invent solutions to overcome the obstacles.

    "There are over sixty YES country networks represented in this hall today, and I salute them all, the artisans of a better future.

    But this meeting is special, it is intended to be both a capstone for the past effort that created these YES country networks, and a launching pad for a decade-long campaign to open up opportunities and empower youth all over the world to create sustainable livelihoods for better tomorrows," Mrs. Mubarak stressed.

    "That is why we are all here. The parliamentarians, the political leaders, the NGOs, the ministers, the private sector and the media. The coalition will support youth, but youth will do it themselves.

    So I bid you all welcome to Egypt, land of timeless hospitality and achievement. I bid you all welcome in the Bibiiotheca Alexandrina, a most suitable venue for such a worldwide gathering seeking the betterment of youth opportunities in the area of knowledge-based economy, and I bid you all welcome to this meeting, which will be much more than a meeting," she said.

    "Far from this meeting, we intend to launch a campaign to reach the unreached, remember the forgotten and include the excluded and to open doors of opportunity for the talents of a younger generation to create a better future for themselves and a better world for all," she concluded.