President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi inaugurated on Saturday the eighth National Youth Conference in New Cairo. The one-day conference began with a documentary that presented Egypt's efforts in supporting young people. The documentary stated that empowering youth has been of utmost priority to President El-Sisi since he assumed office. It added that President El-Sisi launched the presidential leadership programme to empower youth and held the first youth conference in 2016 in Sharm El-Sheikh to establish dialogue with young people. The state has encouraged young people to do business and set up a new agency for the development of small and medium-sized enterprises. It allocated EGP 200 billion to fund loans for young people to start their own projects. Another documentary was screened about terrorist threats, which is the theme of the first session of the conference. It showed that in 2018 the world lost $60 billion because of terrorism. Regardless of its many forms, terrorism has been a global threat for centuries, the documentary said. Egypt, it added, has a long history and experience in fighting terrorism and terrorist groups atop of which comes the Muslim Brotherhood. The documentary reviewed the violence of the Brotherhood against the Egyptian people and the epic events of the 30 June Revolution in which the army responded to the call of the people. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, Parliament Speaker Ali Abdel-Aal and a host of ministers and senior officials are attending the conference. Some 1,600 participants -- most of whom are young people, including university students, youths who worked on El-Sisi's presidential campaign, engineers working on national projects and entrepreneurs -- are expected to take part in the event, a conference statement said. The conference is scheduled to comprise three sessions, most notably the "Ask the President" session, where President El-Sisi will answer questions from the public. More to follow
