Al-Madinah

Last summer’s school holidays were among the longest ever, which leads us to ask: How did young people use this time to invest in their future?

Unfortunately, the word investment here means wasting half the day by staying up all night and not doing anything useful. This is especially the case with teenagers and families who do not travel abroad and just stay at home. Although I have no specific statistics to prove this, this issue should be taken into consideration since it affects our country.

I remember the Kingdom investing a lot of energy into encouraging voluntary work. However, we still do not have enough committed volunteers. For instance, if all of the youth in the Kingdom were to become involved in voluntary work then we could potentially generate several million hours of work for the benefit of society.

For example, there are over three million young people, males and females, who are over 13 years of age and are studying in the Kingdom’s schools. If we were to recruit only one million youngsters to carry out voluntary work for just one month for six hours a day, this would immensely benefit the Kingdom.

People may ask: How much can we really benefit from voluntary work done by the younger generation? Are we really incapable of investing in our youth? Are opportunities for voluntary work hard to find?

Believe me, there are numerous volunteering opportunities in many different areas and fields. There are also a lot of families and individuals who are willing to participate in these volunteering opportunities and who are ready to invest in themselves and their country instead of wasting time.

In my opinion, all we need is some money, willingness and excellent marketing to encourage our youth to carry out voluntary work. This will, hopefully, result in some real investment and will benefit our children and the Kingdom.