With a youth unemployment rate at around 35 percent, Lebanon presents its youth with the blatant choice to either emigrate and join a brain drain, or to stay and struggle to find a job. Many of them choose to migrate for job opportunities abroad. The majority of those who stay have a secondary education or less, around 40 percent have no education.
The country has little to offer to its over-supply of educated Lebanese. To absorb the growing number of job seekers, Lebanon needs to create 23,000 jobs per year over the next decade. For several years, the government programs designed to create new jobs have resulted in creating a couple of thousand jobs annually, most of which do not lead to additional hires, and are not innovative.
Many of the educated and eager labor force have decided to stay in their homeland and start something of their own, despite all the impediments. Such young firms and startups are the job creation engines. With the support of the BDL Circular 331, which gives banks incentives to invest in knowledge economy companies, we have observed a rise in the Lebanese startup ecosystem generating additional jobs. The development of the startup ecosystem would additionally increase job wages as they are all exposed to worldwide demand.
Usually, startups get started with just a handful of people, and once the seed money starts to flow in, they scale their business and start employing more people and aim to grow further. Realistically, Lebanon’s problems are too big for one relatively new and small sector to solve on its own, however, it can lead the way.
Companies that are innovative, disruptive, and scalable can support economic recovery and are the means to creating jobs, and sometimes an entire industry. Simply creating individual jobs without any future outlook is ineffective. One glance at similar examples around the world makes it clear that entrepreneurs lead the growth and not government programs.
One might think that only large companies such as Facebook create jobs, whereas all the small to medium size startups contribute to the overall job creation. Moreover, when individuals leave their jobs and found a company, they are not only creating a job for themselves but every person they hire.
Lebanese youth represent the future of Lebanon, and the most effective actions the government, education institutions, and society can take to combat youth unemployment is to create conditions as well as the appropriate culture that support individual entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have the drive and vision to bring a company into existence, with civil society’s support, their collective creative output could impact the future of our youth.
