“Your Job Next to Your Home” Initiative: A New Model for Promoting Small Industries and Addressing Unemployment Problems

Abstract:
Launched in 2016 and still delivering results, the “Your Job Next to Your Home” initiative embodies an advanced industrial model based on an innovative collaborative relationship between small and large enterprises. This initiative aims to address the challenges of providing skilled labor by establishing small factories within villages, ensuring sustainable job opportunities for rural residents near their homes. The initiative also links the output of these factories to the supply chains of larger factories in distant industrial cities, enhancing industrial integration, and ensuring the success of small enterprises in marketing their products. This is done within the framework of a special institutional relationship between the government, major exporters, and promising youth from the governorates. In this context, this study seeks to assess the extent to which the initiative has achieved its objectives on the ground and explores the possibility of replicating the model in other governorates and economic sectors. Besides the introduction, the study is comprised of five main sections. Section I addresses the initiative’s concept and its underlying economic model. Section II focuses on a field analysis of the experience of factories established in the governorate of Qalyoubeya within the framework of the initiative. Section III presents the results of a survey directed to female workers in these factories, with the aim of identifying the initiative’s impact on their participation in the labor market. Section IV highlights the key developments witnessed by the initiative and provides an assessment of its status since the study period up to the present. Section V concludes with the key findings.