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Work, income and finance

Role of government: Shared Shaped jointly by administrations, markets and society.

Access and experience by state

Each line connects the access score of a state (left) with its experience score (right). A downward slope indicates that access exceeds experience; an upward slope indicates the reverse. The gradient is proportional to the gap.

Bivariate distribution of access and experience

States are classified into terciles of access and of experience in this domain, relative to the other nine states, and shaded accordingly.

Source: A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026 · non-probability samples; scores describe respondents.

The ten states in this domain

Ranking

AccessExperience

59.2Access · regional mean

50.4Experience · regional mean

+8.8Access–experience gap

0.85How closely access and experience move together across countries (correlation)

What the survey asks: access

Employment status; arrears on rent or mortgage; ability to borrow a small sum; a bank near the home and its use for saving or credit.

What the survey asks: experience

Feelings about the current job or about not working, how well the household is managing, ease of covering housing costs, views on opportunities to find work and to increase income, and feelings about personal and household finances.

Findings

Access ranges from 47.4 (Yemen) to 89.9 (Tunisia); experience from 41.7 (Iraq) to 63.9 (Tunisia). Access exceeds experience in nine states, most in Tunisia (26.0), Morocco (15.3) and Jordan (12.4); Egypt is the exception (47.9 and 49.1).

What the gap may indicate (inference, not measured)Bank access and employment do not translate into felt financial security in most states. The pattern is consistent with inadequate income, debt or insecure work; the survey does not record income adequately enough to test this.

Administrative implicationFinancial inclusion targets written as account ownership will be met before felt security improves; income adequacy and employment quality are the outcomes to monitor.

Citizens voice

“I want to find a job close to my residence”
Yemen

“Providing more opportunities for young people”
Egypt

What respondents said they would change. Open-ended answers as transcribed in English by the survey team, lightly edited for punctuation; attributed by country only.

Figure 1Work, income and finance: the gap is widest in Tunisia; experience runs ahead in Egypt

AccessExperienceDotted lines: regional averages

Tunisia89.9 · 63.9 Morocco68.1 · 52.8 Jordan59.0 · 46.6 Iraq52.7 · 41.7 Saudi Arabia55.5 · 48.9 Qatar55.1 · 49.0 Kuwait62.5 · 56.7 Yemen47.4 · 43.6 Lebanon53.9 · 51.7 Egypt47.9 · 49.1

Sorted by the gap between access and experience.

A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026, ten states, N = 1,861. Wave 1 · Release 1.0 · September 2026.Image (PNG)

Figure 2Work, income and finance: access and experience rise together

Gulf and Arabian PeninsulaLevant and IraqNorth Africa

Dashed line: access equals experienceDotted lines: regional averages

A-SCOPE MENA, Arab Access and Experience Dataset 2026, ten states, N = 1,861. Wave 1 · Release 1.0 · September 2026.Image (PNG)