Omani Youth Day: Looking forward with achievable hopes and aspirations

MUSCAT: The Sultanate of Oman will celebrate Omani Youth Day, which falls on 26 October every year. Since the outset of the renaissance, youth have been the focus of the State’s attention.

His Majesty Sultan Haitham Bin Tarik reiterated this approach at all events, the latest of which was the meeting of the Council of Ministers on 12 October 2021.

His Majesty the Sultan underscored the role of youth in the development process, noting that youth constitute the present and future of nations. In this context, His Majesty laid emphasis on the significance of establishing mechanisms and channels of communication capable of portraying the efforts made to answer the needs of development in all sectors.

His Majesty the Sultan stressed the importance of listening to youth and responding to their aspirations. For this purpose, His Majesty the Sultan instructed governors, in cooperation with the departments concerned, to hold regular meetings with youth, to take up issues of concern to them and listen to their views in a manner that enables them to perform the role expected of them in promoting the march of nation building.

This has been a longstanding conviction expressed by His Majesty the Sultan during his Royal speech on 23 February 2020, when he said, “Youth are the wealth of a nation, its inexhaustible resource and the arms that build it. They are its present and future. We will always listen to them, and sense their needs, interests and aspirations which will definitely be accorded the attention that they deserve.

“We stand today with firm invincible will on the threshold of a vital stage of development and nation building. It is a stage in which you all have participated in drawing out its prospects in Oman Vision 2040, and contributed to devising its economic, social and cultural goals, in a manner that embodies a clear-cut vision, great expectation towards a more prosperous future. We are all aware of the challenges imposed by the current global conditions, and their implications to the region and to us, since we are part of this world, influencing it and are influenced by it.”