Business & Money | Tuesday 1 November, 2016 12:41 pm |

With 76% of youth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) indicating that finding a job is the biggest challenge of their generation,* Education For Employment (EFE) and Bayt.com have launched a partnership to support youth employment in MENA.  The collaboration will enable youth trained by EFE to benefit from job market insights and opportunities generated by Bayt.com, and will provide employers with direct access to a pool of skilled, retainable EFE Alumni across the MENA.  

Commenting on the collaboration, Rabea Ataya, founder and CEO of Bayt.com, stated that "In this region, the single most pressing issue of our time is a very young population faced with the highest unemployment rate in the world. At Bayt.com, we’ve dedicated the past 16 years to connecting people with opportunities, and tackling the challenges that young people face when it comes to finding jobs. This collaboration with Education For Employment is exciting for us as it will allow us to empower even more young people with the tools and information they need to build their lifestyle of choice."

Jasmine Nahhas di Florio, Senior Vice President for Strategy and Partnerships at EFE, added that, “At Education For Employment, we believe that when youth have the right skills and job opportunities, they can do more than transform their own lives: they can transform their communities and companies, too.  We are proud to partner with Bayt.com to help employers tap into the dynamic pool of skilled, ready-to-work EFE Alumni, and to connect youth to the job market insights they need to make smart career decisions.”

Drawing on their expertise and networks with employer and youth, EFE and Bayt.com will raise awareness of tangible steps that both sets of stakeholders can undertake to increase youth employment outcomes.  They will explore additional ways to collaborate to boost youth employment outcomes in MENA.

The Bayt.com and EFE partnership builds on the success of the Opportunity Café led by Starbucks MENA in collaboration with EFE and Bayt.com in April 2016.  The Opportunity Café initiative organized the region’s largest-ever CV writing workshop across 29 Starbucks stores to train youth and help them prepare for jobs, and produced youth employment insights through a survey of over 600 youth across the region.