An Interview with Nafez Husseini
What role does the private sector play in bridging the divide between education and employment for hundreds of thousands of youth in economically depressed areas?
Education for Employment (EFE) attempts to bring the private sector and the education sector together to address the problem of a skills mismatch—graduates leaving local schools and entering the workforce without the skills employers need. This skills mismatch is one of the biggest contributors to high youth unemployment rates in the Middle East. As EFE explains, “Private-sector employers often are reluctant to hire youth from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, and youth in turn do not trust that the system will give them a fair chance.”
Consolidated Contractors Company began working with EFE in 2006 as the organization’s first employer partner, hiring EFE graduates from Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, and Tunisia. To find out more about how their partnership with EFE helps to shape the region, the Diplomatic Courier sat down with Nafez Husseini, VP of ICT and Digital Business for Consolidated Contractors Company, at the Concordia Summit in New York City.
***
[Diplomatic Courier:] Tell me a little bit about Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), what you do in the Middle East, and especially what you are doing in Gaza.
[Nafez Husseini:] We are the largest Middle East regional construction company. We are based out of Athens, Greece and we serve the whole Middle East region.
What we have done in Gaza in the past, for example, we are the people who built and are the majority owner of the electricity company there. We engaged with EFE (Education for Employment) in Gaza back in 2006 when Ronald Bruder came to us with this great idea: “I’m not going to give you just training, but I’m going to take from you job commitments and I’m going to give you better recruits from the region you are interested in.”
We told him we are interested in Palestine, specifically Gaza and the West Bank, being very economically depressed areas. Our interest in Gaza these days is not business, because as you know it is a closed area now. Our interest is to lessen some of the dire conditions that some of the people are experiencing by trying to take more of the people there to more permanent and gainful jobs.
[DC:] What impact have you seen in the region; maybe not just Gaza but also areas like the West Bank and Yemen?
[NH:] What we do is a drop in the bucket, and it needs 100 more companies like us to engage in the region and create gainful employment. I notice that one of the biggest things on the minds of everybody is creating employment for youth. It so happens that the Arab countries typically have 40 to 60 percent unemployment rates for youth, which is very dangerous. It leads to boredom, and you don’t get a chance to build citizens that can participate in local and global economies. This is what we are trying to do. We hope to be able to recruit more folks that will open the eyes of others to the possibilities. The quality of education there is adequate, but it can be tremendously improved. One way of doing this is by encouraging people from the West and other developed countries to come and engage with the universities demanding changes—better alignment in curricula and better graduates. This is easily doable. We believe we have an excellent talent. We invite the West to take a serious look at this and understand that they are not only investing in the business, they are investing in the society; they are investing in regional stability; and they are investing in the world economy.
[DC:] What advice would you have for a company that wants to follow in CCC’s footsteps, reaching out to youth and trying to encourage a better job pool?
[NH:] Think out of the box. Don’t just target the traditional markets of recruitment. Join up with companies, like EFE, in trying to approach the best market that can be improved dramatically with education. This happened with us in the EFE experience. What we did was actually tell them we need accountants, and we need better construction engineers with management backgrounds. We joined up with the University of Maryland and offered many courses for the people in Gaza. We actually hired about eleven of them, and the others who were trained went into the local market. Similarly for the construction management: they joined up with the University of Colorado, which has one of the best construction management programs in the U.S. These people were also hired, some were taken up by us and some taken up by other companies. Basically, people are fed up with just training, but if you have a committed job and a good screening process, a rigorous training program that really can filter out the good from the bad and show capabilities, this motive is great and should be followed. I ask all the companies to open their eyes, think out of the box, and give even the smaller universities a chance to get graduates to succeed in the economy.
Photo courtesy of the Concordia Summit.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2014 print edition.
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Addressing the Skills Gap From the Employer’s Perspective
February 5, 2014
An Interview with Nafez Husseini
What role does the private sector play in bridging the divide between education and employment for hundreds of thousands of youth in economically depressed areas?
Education for Employment (EFE) attempts to bring the private sector and the education sector together to address the problem of a skills mismatch—graduates leaving local schools and entering the workforce without the skills employers need. This skills mismatch is one of the biggest contributors to high youth unemployment rates in the Middle East. As EFE explains, “Private-sector employers often are reluctant to hire youth from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, and youth in turn do not trust that the system will give them a fair chance.”
Consolidated Contractors Company began working with EFE in 2006 as the organization’s first employer partner, hiring EFE graduates from Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, and Tunisia. To find out more about how their partnership with EFE helps to shape the region, the Diplomatic Courier sat down with Nafez Husseini, VP of ICT and Digital Business for Consolidated Contractors Company, at the Concordia Summit in New York City.
***
[Diplomatic Courier:] Tell me a little bit about Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), what you do in the Middle East, and especially what you are doing in Gaza.
[Nafez Husseini:] We are the largest Middle East regional construction company. We are based out of Athens, Greece and we serve the whole Middle East region.
What we have done in Gaza in the past, for example, we are the people who built and are the majority owner of the electricity company there. We engaged with EFE (Education for Employment) in Gaza back in 2006 when Ronald Bruder came to us with this great idea: “I’m not going to give you just training, but I’m going to take from you job commitments and I’m going to give you better recruits from the region you are interested in.”
We told him we are interested in Palestine, specifically Gaza and the West Bank, being very economically depressed areas. Our interest in Gaza these days is not business, because as you know it is a closed area now. Our interest is to lessen some of the dire conditions that some of the people are experiencing by trying to take more of the people there to more permanent and gainful jobs.
[DC:] What impact have you seen in the region; maybe not just Gaza but also areas like the West Bank and Yemen?
[NH:] What we do is a drop in the bucket, and it needs 100 more companies like us to engage in the region and create gainful employment. I notice that one of the biggest things on the minds of everybody is creating employment for youth. It so happens that the Arab countries typically have 40 to 60 percent unemployment rates for youth, which is very dangerous. It leads to boredom, and you don’t get a chance to build citizens that can participate in local and global economies. This is what we are trying to do. We hope to be able to recruit more folks that will open the eyes of others to the possibilities. The quality of education there is adequate, but it can be tremendously improved. One way of doing this is by encouraging people from the West and other developed countries to come and engage with the universities demanding changes—better alignment in curricula and better graduates. This is easily doable. We believe we have an excellent talent. We invite the West to take a serious look at this and understand that they are not only investing in the business, they are investing in the society; they are investing in regional stability; and they are investing in the world economy.
[DC:] What advice would you have for a company that wants to follow in CCC’s footsteps, reaching out to youth and trying to encourage a better job pool?
[NH:] Think out of the box. Don’t just target the traditional markets of recruitment. Join up with companies, like EFE, in trying to approach the best market that can be improved dramatically with education. This happened with us in the EFE experience. What we did was actually tell them we need accountants, and we need better construction engineers with management backgrounds. We joined up with the University of Maryland and offered many courses for the people in Gaza. We actually hired about eleven of them, and the others who were trained went into the local market. Similarly for the construction management: they joined up with the University of Colorado, which has one of the best construction management programs in the U.S. These people were also hired, some were taken up by us and some taken up by other companies. Basically, people are fed up with just training, but if you have a committed job and a good screening process, a rigorous training program that really can filter out the good from the bad and show capabilities, this motive is great and should be followed. I ask all the companies to open their eyes, think out of the box, and give even the smaller universities a chance to get graduates to succeed in the economy.
Photo courtesy of the Concordia Summit.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2014 print edition.
