Let's study 50 million young people
The SAHWA Project (Researching Arab Mediterranean Youth: Towards a New Social Contract) endeavours to explore youth perspectives and prospects. As a starting point, it is useful to bear in mind some basic figures about our object of study: we are dealing with 50 million young people aged 15 to 30 in the five SAHWA countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon), which is 30% of their total population, the largest generation in the history of those countries. That number—the “youth bulge” as those analysing the demographic transition call it—will not decrease in the next generation or so: by 2020 there will be close to 60 million, and, for most of these countries, they will continue growing until at least 2030.
