With 1.3 billion young people now living in the developing world-the largest-ever youth group in history-the report says there has never been a better time to invest in youth because they are healthier and better educated than previous generations, and they will join the workforce with fewer dependents because of changing demographics. However, failure to seize this opportunity to train them more effectively for the workplace, and to be active citizens, could lead to widespread disillusionment and social tensions.

The report says that young people make up nearly half of the ranks of the world's unemployed, and, for example, that the Middle East and North Africa region alone must create 100 million jobs by 2020 in order to stabilize its employment situation. Moreover, surveys of young people in East Asia and Eastern Europe and Central Asia-carried out as research for the report-indicate that access to jobs, along with physical security, is their biggest concern.

The Bank attempts to look at the full half of the glass with the recommendation to invest more in the education and health of the youth population which can be a driving force for economic growth rather than a threat.

No where this challenge is more acute than in the Middle East region. The report states the following trends:

The MENA region has about 100 million young people aged 12-24. The number of young people in these countries will peak in the next 25 years. Countries differ—for instance, Egypt is set to experience an extended peak between 2010 and 2030, while Iraq and Yemen will not peak for 20 years or more.

WDR 2007 notes that the expected decline in dependency (increase in working age population relative to non-working age population) offers a tremendous opportunity for economic growth in MENA, provided that the greater labor supply is productively employed, and that saving and investment increase.

However, an increase in the number of young people does not automatically translate into dividends. Whether MENA countries will repeat the progress of the Asian economies—which have already taken advantage of their fast-growing working age population—will depend to a large extent on the extent of improvement in the overall skills of the labor force, built largely in youth.

Some progress has occurred in the region—countries in MENA have increased schooling among both young men and young women. However, the speed at which the demographic opportunity is approaching presents considerable challenges for getting educational and economic building blocks in place in time to benefit from the opportunity.

The report states that if these challenges are not met more urgently than is currently the trend in many countries, they could further contribute to an unstable environment. If the gap between young people’s education, energy, and hopes and the limited number of opportunities that actually exist for them becomes wider, these young people are likely to become increasingly frustrated and disenfranchised.

The major problem is unemployment. According to the report the average unemployment rates are highest among both youth and adults in MENA, when compared to all other developing regions. The share of young people among the region’s unemployed is higher than 50 percent in most countries. In Egypt, Qatar and Syria, youth make up more than 60 percent of the unemployed while in Tunisia, the unemployment rate for 20-24 year olds is more than three times higher then that for people above 40.

It goes without saying that this high unemployment rate is a major contributor to the increasing wave of fundamentalism in the region where youth feeling hopeless about the future will be easily recruited by the religious fundamentalist groups and become weapons against their own communities.

Such challenges cannot be faced with the mere indicator of GDP but with more opportunities for freedom, social justice and sustainable development; aspirations that have been elusive so far in this region.