Qatar will soon have a National Youth Policy, and its draft will be revealed tomorrow during the Najah Qatari Forum being held at Qatar National Convention Centre (QNCC).
Ministry of Sports and Youth (MSY), Youth Center Licenses Researcher, Ahmad Al Ansari, told The Peninsula that the Ministry will present the Youth Policy draft to the public and have a discussion at 3pm at the QNCC. “We worked on the draft for one-and a-half-years and we also conducted a survey among 5,000 people on which topics should be focused on," he said speaking on the sidelines of the Najah Qatari Forum which began yesterday.
Al Ansari explained that under the said draft, they focused on seven main areas which include training, business, health and the environment, among others.
The draft policy will be presented to the Cabinet, and after it has gone through the procedures, it will be presented to Amir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and will issue the law.
Al Ansari is hopeful that the law will be enacted after a month. “Once it becomes a law, Qatar will be the seventh Middle Eastern country to have this policy, next to Kuwait, Oman, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,” he said.
Learning and training developments are among included in the said draft. “The youth programme is comprised of photography, camping, as well as events and this will be all year-round.” Youth aged from 15 to 39 will benefit from the programmes and trainings are free of charge.”
Al Ansari said the Ministry of Sports and Youth is heavily investing on the youth, “because our youth is the future of our country, they will be the leaders of the future.”
On a separate statement, the Ministry said the youth policy is aimed to guide state officials to the orientations of young people, identify the priorities that the state considers in youth issues, and confirm the integration of young people in achieving development, and their readiness for this.
It also explained that the policy draft is a declaration of a common national vision that defines the needs and priorities of youth and provides a basis for equitably distributing the necessary resources to meet these needs, according to a realistic and significant approach of involving young people in decision-making processes in their countries through their active participation in the development and implementation of this policy.
MSY have several booths at the Najah Qatari Forum which are the Privilege section, Youth Initiatives and the Qatari Youth Council. They also encourages the participation of youth on its various programmes. Youth advisor for the Minister of Sports and Youth, Khadeja Ahmad Albuhaliqa also spoke to The Peninsula where she presented the Youth Initiatives and the Excellence Club of the MSY.
“This is a strategic programme that the ministry have, they have the Excellence Club where we have five categories in it, and Najah Qatari provides access to the youth to have the cards so in the future they can use to it to have discounts and other things that will benefit the youth. And also it’s kind of an approval from the Minister himself that this individual do something for the country,” she explained.
To date the Excellence Club has over 40 members after it was just recently launched on November 2021.
The Excellence Club has five categories which include the Youth Power, Youth Leaders, Youth Innovative, Al Adam Ambassadors, and Youth Entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, MSY has also featured 12 Youth Initiatives wherein “all of them are helping the society a lot. We have a lot of environmental initiatives right now, that’s why we are linking the initiatives to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” she explained.
SDGs are a collection of 17 interlinked global goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” The goals are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. This was set up in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly.
Albuhaliqa revealed that the youth is participating more on the Ministry’s programmes, “We have received over 300 applications and that’s among the rarest time that we have that kind of participation under the last programme that we had which is Al Adam Ambassadors. They noticed the importance [of the programmes] and we know now and have studied, and built a perspective what youth wanted in the future and how we can reach them.
We are building a roadmap towards the goal of how to convince youth to join the Ministry,” she said. The said programmes are designed for youth Qataris.
