Person:
Abdel Jelil, Mohamed

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Last updated:August 20, 2025
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Mohamed is a Social Protection Specialist working in the Eastern and Southern Africa region. He is focusing on the issues of resilience, employment and service delivery. Before that, Mohamed worked in the Office of the Vice President for Human Development, where he supported the Vice President through the COVID response. He also worked in the Europe and Central Asia and the MENA regions where he was engaged on various issues including the waves of forced displacement in the aftermath of the Syrian and Libyan conflicts, the redistributive impacts of the housing policies in Eastern Europe, as well as migration and youth employment. He is a Mauritanian national and received a Master’s in Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Supelec and a Master of Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris.

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2020 - 202522000 - 20192
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Now showing1 - 4 of 4
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    Migration: Africa’s Untapped Potential
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-08-21) Abdel Jelil, Mohamed; Adhikari, Samik; Do, Quy-Toan; Kaila, Heidi; Marzo, Federica; Nsababera, Olive; Seshan, Ganesh; Shrestha, Maheshwor
    Migration in Africa is primarily driven by the search for economic opportunity, safety, and security, including from environmental hardships. However, migration’s potential to uplift African livelihoods remains largely untapped. While nearly 15 percent of the world’s migrant population is from Sub-Saharan Africa, two-thirds of Sub-Saharan migrants stay within Africa, and the majority move within regional economic communities. Africa is also home to a quarter of the world’s refugees, primarily hosted in neighboring countries. Africa is now at a pivotal crossroads. With a rapidly growing young population facing economic stagnation, conflict, and climate change, the continent’s workforce is expected to increase by 600 million people by 2050, making up a third of the world’s youth. In contrast, labor forces in high-income and upper-middle-income countries are set to decline by 200 million. This demographic divergence opens a window of opportunity for Africa to enhance its migration management systems. Realizing the potential of migration requires deliberate policies to address challenges and maximize the benefits of migration for both origin and destination countries, as well as for the migrants. Investing in migration systems can better support migrants across the migration cycle, from developing skills in demand domestically, regionally, and globally to ensuring dignity and safety in transit or at their destination. Increasing the number of legal migration pathways is crucial to disincentivize irregular movements and foster safe, orderly migration. Effective migration management also includes promoting integration in host societies and facilitating voluntary returns. This can be achieved through instruments such as bilateral labor migration agreements with destination countries. Entering these agreements as a unified bloc would strengthen individual countries’ bargaining power, improve conditions for migrants, and maximize the economic benefits of migration. Additionally, the empowerment and self-reliance of refugees and internally displaced persons call for increased collaboration among African nations.
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    Transnational Terrorist Recruitment: Evidence from Daesh Personnel Records
    (MIT Press, 2022-01-25) Brockmeyer, Anne; Do, Quy-Toan; Joubert, Clement; Bhatia, Kartika; Abdel Jelil, Mohamed
    Global terrorist organizations attract radicalized individuals across borders and constitute a threat for both sending and receiving countries. We use unique personnel records from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Daesh) to show that unemployment in sending countries is associated with the number of transnational terrorist recruits from these countries. The relationship is spatially heterogeneous, which is most plausibly attributable to travel costs. We argue that poor labor market opportunities generally push more individuals to join terrorist organizations, but at the same time limit their ability to do so when longer travel distances imply higher migration costs.
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    Unemployment and Violent Extremism: Evidence from Daesh Foreign Recruits
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) Abdel Jelil, Mohamed; Bhatia, Kartika; Brockmeyer, Anne; Do, Quy-Toan; Joubert, Clement
    Transnational terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS/ISIL or Daesh) have shown an ability to attract radicalized individuals from many countries to join their ranks. Using a novel data set that reports countries of residence and educational levels of a large sample of Daesh's foreign recruits, this paper finds that a lack of economic opportunities -- measured by unemployment rates disaggregated by country and education level -- explains foreign enrollment in the terrorist organization, especially for countries that are geographically closer to the Syrian Arab Republic.
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    Living and Leaving: Housing, Mobility and Welfare in the European Union
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11-01) Karver, Jonathan; Inchauste, Gabriela; Kim, Yeon Soo; Abdel Jelil, Mohamed
    The availability and affordability of decent housing has become an important economic and social concern in the European Union (EU), as housing price increases in metropolitan regions have often outpaced wage increases. Housing is at the heart of growing economic divides in Europe. This is because productivity growth, which comes with higher wages and better jobs, is concentrated in cities and industrial clusters. Housing is unaffordable in metropolitan centers because the construction of new homes has not kept up with demand, reducing the standard of living of low-income households, and dissuading workers from moving to the most productive regions. While policy incentives have favored homeowners since the 1970s, less attention and resources have been devoted to easing the potential barriers and market restrictions that would allow housing supply to respond to increases in demand. Across EU member states, policymakers should focus on ensuring that land use, rental and other regulations are consistent with incentives to spur residential construction. The report highlights three key recommendations for EU policymakers: earmark unused public land for housing development and speed up approval processes; invest in greenfield projects with improved transportation links from suburban areas, to ensure cities cast a wider economic net; and create public registries to improve transparency of house sale prices to help greater competition between areas.