Dubai Cares to arm 15m youth with future skills
Partnership with World Economic Forum aims to empower youth in 15 countries
Dubai: More than 15 million youth in 15 countries will be armed with a new set of skills to tackle the requirements of the future world as Dubai Cares in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) embarks on a major reskilling revolution.
To be completed by 2021, Dubai Cares’ Dh5.5 million funding will be equally allocated to two critical three-year programmes managed by WEF’s Centre for the New Economy and Society (CNES).
The first programme, ‘Closing the Skills Gap: Preparing Education Systems for the Future of Work,’ aims to build a network of public-private partnerships in 10 countries initially, to be scaled up to a total of 15 developing economies by 2020.
The programme is set to focus on future skills demand and prepare education and training systems to meet the demands of today’s job market.
The second programme, ‘Shared Vision for Talent in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ aims to address the growing mismatch between the supply and demand of future skills in the labour market. The programme aims to make this model operational by working with key business players, top universities and the Edu-Tech community to adopt a shared taxonomy for skills and pilot the implementation across emerging economies.
Commenting on the partnership, Tarek Al Gurg, chief executive officer at Dubai Cares, said: “This (partnership) is particularly important when we think of the 850 million youth who will enter the workforce by 2050 without being equipped with the necessary skills. The speed of digital technological progress is resulting in substantial changes in global workforce requirements and priority skills needed, and it is our duty to prepare the current and future generations to adapt to this new reality in a manner that is relevant and contextual.”
Sa’adia Zahidi, head of the CNES and member of the managing Board, WEF, said that there is a need to break out of the current paralysis and recognise that skills are the ‘great redistributor.’
According to the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) latest report ‘World Social and Employment Outlook — Trends 2018,’ young people under the age of 25 are less likely to find work than adults. The global youth unemployment rate stands at 13 per cent, which is three times higher than the figure for adults, standing at 4.3 per cent.