BitterSweet first published this story in 2017, with myself, Brandon Bray, and Steve Jeter traveling to Amman, Jordan and Ramallah, Palestine to learn about Education for Employment and issues related to youth unemployment in the Middle East. This was five years after the Arab Spring ended in 2012 and five years before the Hamas attacks on October 7th, 2023, followed by the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Now—mid-year 2025—increasing volatility is clarifying yet again one investment we cannot afford not to make: economic opportunities for young people—pathways to viable, vibrant futures of their own making.

We must build, even as things crumble.

As bombs fall in Tehran and Tel Aviv and missiles fly through the Mediterranean, millions of young people in the Middle East are walking across graduation stages straight into career purgatory. Degrees give way to disillusionment as graduates find that diplomas here are keys to doors that don’t exist. These 67 million educated, digitally-native, tech-savvy, working- and marrying-age Arab twenty-somethings represent the largest source of urgently needed, latent potential in the world today.

In the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), more than half of the population is under 30. Not only is this the largest concentration of young people globally, it’s one of the largest ‘youth bulges’ in history. For people ages 18-24, the unemployment rate is 25%—the highest in the world and nearly twice the global average. This makes first jobs exceptionally competitive even where and when economies are stable.

Since 2002, Education for Employment (EFE) has made this problem its mission, scaling to become a network of locally-run NGOs operating across 11 countries, connecting unemployed youth to the world of work.

Last year, 68% of its entrepreneurship graduates were young women and 6% had experienced displacement or become refugees as a result of war. In Yemen, nearly 400 young women graduates started their own businesses, beginning what EFE hopes is “a new generation of female-led businesses in a country where female labor force participation is among the lowest in the world.” In Jordan, 629 Syrian refugee women, arguably the most vulnerable population in Jordan, completed training and quickly began to support their families and strengthen their communities in new ways.

Having fled Syria’s civil war with her family, Angham Al-Rawi entered her twenties as a refugee in Jordan. It was there that a Facebook ad led her to the local EFE vocational training program and set her on an entrepreneurial track. Since earning a technical certification at Bait Paris Academy and learning business management skills from EFE, Angham has built a steady clientele and supports her family with stable income earned through a beauty services business operated from her home.

After completing training through EFE-Jordan’s culinary arts program, Mohammed Nour became assistant chef at the well-known Ren Chai restaurant in Amman. Mohammed’s family fled Syria in 2014, when he was 15 years old. “I became a refugee in the blink of an eye,” he says. A decade later, Mohammed is supporting his family of six and is charting a next degree in journalism “to become a voice of truth for those suffering,” he says. “My future is bright.”

A native Jordanian, Asmahan Awaysheh had long wanted to start a beekeeping and honey production business but didn’t know where to start. From making a budget and conducting a feasibility study to how to package and market her products, “the EFE training gave me the answers for everything I needed to know,” she says. Since those early days in 2017, she has transitioned Awayseh Apiaries from a seasonal honey-making operation to a sustainable business by expanding her product line to include various honey and beeswax soaps, bee pollen, and creams.

Maria Armanyous was a charming, curly-haired teen when she went through the training program. Today she is a hair-styling influencer with more than 86,000 followers on Instagram and a fully staffed, thriving salon in Cairo.

Samira Mutlaq is married with four children and went through EFE’s entrepreneurship training program in hopes of starting a peanut farming business. "Society was against me,” she remembers. “They thought that a woman and a housewife can’t go out to the outside community and prove herself. They were against the idea, but now all the women in my society are thinking how to start a project like mine and do the same.” Today, eight years later, her Super Peanut products are available in four flavors, licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, produced by a team of ten, and sold all over Jordan. To achieve the environmental sustainability goals she has set for her company, Samira has leveraged the waste from the peanuts to produce an organic fertilizer which she now also sells.

These are just five of the 215,000 examples EFE could point to. It’s not hard to see the direct and day-to-day difference their empowerment makes for their families, communities, and countries. Imagine the vitality unleashed in the region if even 1 million of the 67 million young people graduating this year could carve similar paths.

“We know the incredible impact that comes when young people are given the skills and opportunities to transform their futures,” says Dina Dandachli, CEO of EFE-Europe. “These young people are real changemakers: they are creating businesses, providing much-needed emergency support, and young women are breaking into male-dominated industries.”

At 19%, the female labor force participation rate in MENA is the lowest in the world, but the World Bank estimates that if full gender equality in MENA labor markets were achieved, regional GDP could increase by nearly 50% over the next ten years—presenting both a unique challenge and a significant opportunity for EFE.

Take Hiba Zalatimo. Hiba came to EFE with little more than a freshly inked degree from Birzeit University in the West Bank. Having lost her mother at a young age and with younger siblings growing up quickly behind her, the desire to provide for her family was a strong and central motivation. But she knew it’d be hard.

“Few employers even look at your CV,” she says, “they prefer to hire through their families and close social networks. It’s hard to break in, especially as a woman.”

When EFE opened a branch in Jerusalem, Hiba’s hometown, she was one of the first to register. “We practiced presentation skills, teamwork, time management—all the skills that I use today,” she says. With EFE’s help, she landed an entry-level job as an HR coordinator at Ceaser Hotel, one of Palestine’s top hotels, then was quickly promoted to lead the marketing department and manage a team of 60 people.

When the hotel announced the opening of a new hospitality academy, Hiba was selected to manage it, coordinating everything from procurement to accounting to marketing and HR. Just before Covid took the world by storm, she accepted a position as HR and Finance Officer with Doctors Worldwide and then in 2022 became HR Director of Première Urgence Internationale, a French nonprofit supporting communities marginalized due to war, natural disaster, or economic crises.

EFE has created a way for extraordinary stories like Hiba’s to become more ordinary in the Arab world. Across the 11 countries where EFE works there is a broad cultural bias toward public sector jobs which are seen as stable and low risk, rather than private sector jobs, which are seen as less stable and higher risk. This bias leads the majority of youth to choose education tracks that prepare them for public sector jobs, though jobs in that sector are in shorter and shorter supply. This is part of the reason 72% of CEOs in the region cite ‘lack of available talent with key skills’ as the second biggest business risk they face, while young people continue to graduate university then spend years on hold waiting for even one decent job opportunity.

“The Arab world comprises distinctly different countries, each with its own unique characteristics and challenges. Nonetheless, we all share a high regard for education,” says Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development for the United Arab Emirates. “We also share a common statistic of an excessive number of educated but unemployed young men and women. No country in the MENA region can claim total success in both educating and employing its youth. That is why EFE is so important and so necessary in the Arab world.”

EFE’s approach is distinguished in three important ways: it’s multi-national, demand-driven, and committed to job placement (not just training). This isn’t assembly-line, cookie-cutter job training, it is customized workforce development with real jobs in desirable sectors on the other side. By starting with employers' needs and tailoring trainings to suit, EFE is able to tout an 89% job placement rate. This is what makes it a sequin in a world of khaki.

Across its network of locally-run affiliates in Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, and the United Arab Emirates, more than 5,100 companies have hired EFE graduates. In 2024, EFE graduates collectively earned more than $29 million.

While each affiliate operates with relative autonomy at the country level, they benefit from deep collaboration and knowledge sharing at the global level. In this way, EFE is networked for broad impact, structured for scale, and an attractive partner for multi-national corporations with similarly vast regional operations.

For example, the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) is the largest construction firm in the Middle East and was the first corporation to hire EFE graduates.

Over the past 15 years, EFE-Palestine launched two separate and specific training programs to train skilled engineers. The first (in 2007) was a Construction Management Program training unemployed youth in Gaza. The second (in 2013) was tailored specifically for the needs of CCC’s Building Information Modeling (BIM) Center. Abu Alia, head of the center, said, "Palestine-EFE provided us with better skilled graduates who filled our available positions quickly without carrying out costly and time consuming interviews."

CCC has also hired EFE graduates from Jordan, Yemen, and Tunisia. Dalel Abelwaheb Samti was one of them. From Siliana, a farming town in northern Tunisia, Dalel recounts how her parents bought her legos and asked her to make samples of buildings. “As I grew up, the dream of being a structural engineer grew up with me," she says. Many years later, Dalel chose to study civil engineering at ENIG University, but even with good grades and a degree, she found it hard to break into the industry and get a first job.

"Things changed when I found out about EFE and its partnership with Consolidated Contracting Company—they were finding and training Tunisian engineers like me to work at CCC sites around the world. I was so excited.” She sent her CV, diploma, and transcripts, and got the job.

"Today, I manage a team of five—all men,” Dalel says. "Having a job and working with a big company like CCC has been the biggest change in my life. It gave me the chance to try working in an atmosphere full of internationalism and professionalism."

"When you provide stable jobs, you provide a solid foundation for supporting families,” says Samer Khoury, CCC’s President of Engineering and Construction. “Governments here cannot educate or create jobs for all of the youth. The private sector is better equipped—we know the market requirements and have the flexibility to act. With partnerships with NGOs like EFE, companies can be more focused and effective in creating job opportunities for youth."

As I write this, 500,000 people in Gaza are starving to death after a three month food and aid blockade. 90% of the strip’s 2.1 million people have been displaced during Israel’s ongoing, 20-month revenge campaign.

With training for jobs in IT or hospitality suddenly irrelevant, EFE has recalibrated its mission with urgency and compassion, now training young people in emergency first aid, midwifery, and psychosocial first aid.

More than 525 trainees have learned how to care for burns, control bleeding, treat head and neck injuries, give CPR to infants and adults, and support individuals with diabetes or low blood sugar. They have helped 55,766 mothers give birth in shelters and improvised conditions, nurturing new life in the midst of catastrophe.

Soon, we hope, EFE will pivot again—this time to equip the next generation as they rebuild from rubble. Businesses will need to be reestablished and reimagined. Construction will surge from day one. The healthcare industry will be rehabilitated and restaffed. EFE graduates will create the opportunities and solutions needed.

As we witness crises unfurling in spectacularly terrifying ways across the world, BitterSweet will continue to shine a light on those proving courageously steadfast through suffering. 

When the bombs stop falling and the guttural howls of loss subside, when the restoration and healing work begins, EFE will be a model for how we can partner across oceans to create a future of flourishing for all.