There is a number that should be on the minds of every finance minister, every head of state and every development partner: 1.2 billion. That is how many young people will enter the workforce in developing countries over the next decade. It is about the combined population of the EU, the US and Brazil.
However, the world is not ready.
Only about 400,000 jobs are projected to be created over the coming decade, leaving hundreds of thousands of young people without the opportunity for sustainable employment. The question is not whether the jobs challenge is urgent: it is. The question is what actually helps create jobs – and what stands in the way.
The most persistent obstacle is neither a lack of resources nor a shortage of willing entrepreneurs. It is the hurdles built into systems of governance: opaque licensing regimes and paper-based processes that trap firms in bureaucratic loops for weeks. Across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, this friction is not just a nuisance, but an economic burden – one that suppresses private investment, deters entrepreneurship, and erodes the public trust that reform depends on. The world’s top-performing economies set themselves apart by embracing digitalisation, ensuring transparency, and integrating government systems.
Removing those hurdles is a prerequisite for job creation. It is increasingly possible to do so at scale. The question is who shows the way and how these lessons travel.
The UAE’s experience demonstrates that reducing bureaucracy is not merely an administrative exercise; it is an economic growth strategy. Since launching the Zero Government Bureaucracy Programme in 2023, the Emirates has eliminated more than 15,000 unnecessary procedures, requirements, documents, and process steps, reducing service completion times, lowering compliance costs, and freeing millions of hours previously spent navigating administrative processes.
Every unnecessary requirement removed reduces the cost of doing business. Every approval eliminated accelerates investment. Every hour saved allows entrepreneurs, employees and investors to focus on productive activity rather than paperwork. More importantly, the programme has established a new principle for government reform: bureaucracy should not be digitised. It should first be questioned, simplified and, where possible, eliminated altogether.
Over the past three years, the World Bank Group has taken its own steps to confront the jobs challenge by becoming faster, simpler, and a better partner – a shift that helps deliver financing and expertise more efficiently. Project approval times are down from an average of 19 months to 10.
How reform happens
What if governments learnt directly from other governments and development institutions that have navigated the same challenges and built systems that work?
That is the idea behind the World Bank Group’s partnership with the Prime Minister's Office of the UAE – a formal agreement built around a single idea: zero bureaucracy. Not reduced bureaucracy. Not streamlined bureaucracy. Zero.
The agreement commits both institutions to collaborate on public digital-service delivery, administrative simplification, and AI-powered government modernisation – reducing the burden for citizens, businesses, and public servants alike.
The UAE has achieved something most governments are still working toward: a governing system where the default interaction between citizen and state is digital, seamless, and fast. Its ambition is striking: to be an AI-native government by 2027.
The question is whether and how these achievements can be transferred and adapted to countries where the need is most acute.
From pilot to programme
This partnership builds on something already tested. In June 2025, the World Bank Group brought senior delegations from Rwanda and Zimbabwe to the UAE for a week to identify what could work in their own countries.
When they went home, they put their findings to work.
Rwanda applied AI-enhanced tools to construction permitting – cutting processing times by 80 per cent. Zimbabwe is developing a unified services portal and national ID system modeled directly on the UAE experience. In both cases, officials saw something that worked and chose to build it themselves.
Now, we’re scaling the model across Africa and the Middle East, turning the programme into a new way of sharing what works.
We have seen enough country programmes to know that reform alone does not create jobs. Three things have to work together.
First, investing in foundations. You cannot have a digital economy without reliable power. You cannot have job-creating firms without infrastructure to move goods, people, and data. You must invest in human capital – health, education, and skills – to have a prepared workforce.
Second, building business-enabling environments. Every day shaved off a business registration process means one more entrepreneur who enters the formal economy. Every permit issued digitally is a small business spared weeks of lost time. The partnership with the UAE is designed to export this idea: through simplification frameworks, digital identity architecture, and performance-driven governance, adapted country by country.
Third, mobilising private investment. Public resources alone will never meet the jobs challenge at the scale needed. The UAE aims to double its annual foreign direct investment to $65 billion by 2031. The World Bank Group's role is to reduce risk and ensure governments create environments attractive to investors.
None of these work without the others. Reform without infrastructure produces frustrated entrepreneurs with nowhere to grow. Infrastructure without reform produces underused assets. Neither works without private investment. The UAE partnership is valuable precisely because it operates across all three simultaneously.
What 1.2 billion people are waiting for
The UAE’s Government Experience Exchange Programme is designed to build a trusted network of peer learning that accelerates reform – not by telling governments what to do, but by showing them what has been done, by whom, and under what conditions.
The 1.2 billion young people entering the workforce over the next decade cannot wait for the traditional pace of institutional reform. They need governments that work, services that function, and economies where starting a business is an opportunity, not an ordeal. This partnership is concrete, scaleable response grounded in evidence, owned by governments, and built for replication.
Anna Bjerde is managing director of Operations, World Bank Group and Mohamed bin Taliah is assistant minister of Cabinet Affairs for Government Knowledge Exchange, UAE
