MENA's Bus Driver Crisis: A Wake-Up Call for Workforce Transformation
As cities across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) expand their public transport networks to accommodate rapid urbanisation, a critical challenge threatens service reliability: early signs of a growing shortage of qualified bus drivers. New UITP comprehensive research examining bus drivers workforce dynamics across major MENA transport operators reveals structural vulnerabilities threatening public transport sustainability across the region.
The findings paint a picture of an industry built on a foundation that is becoming less stable, where intensifying international competition for drivers, evolving policy priorities, and technological transformation converge to challenge the traditional workforce model that has enabled the sector’s rapid growth.
The Foreign Labour Dependency Paradox
For decades, MENA’s transport operators have relied heavily on foreign workers to staff their expanding bus fleets. This approach offered clear advantages: rapid workforce scaling, operational flexibility, and access to experienced drivers from established labour markets in South Asia, North Africa, and East Africa. In many cities surveyed, foreign nationals comprise 100% of the driver workforce.
Local Workforce Share Across Work Categories, 2018-2023
However, what was once a strategic advantage has become a critical vulnerability. European countries, North America, and Australia are now actively recruiting from these same talent pools, offering higher wages and permanent residency pathways. The result is a perfect storm of rising recruitment costs, accelerating turnover rates, and shrinking available talent in traditional source markets.
The Localisation Gap
Across the MENA region, workforce nationalisation remains a stated policy priority, embedded in national development strategies, especially in the Gulf, a region prone to foreign workforce. Yet while some administrative and support roles have seen modest localisation progress, core operational positions—particularly driving and technical maintenance—remain dominated by foreign workers.
This gap reflects more than implementation challenges. It reveals fundamental barriers that make bus transport careers unattractive to local workers: long and inflexible working hours, limited work-life balance, absence of clear career progression pathways, and perceptions of driving as low-skilled, transitional work rather than a professional career.
Barriers in Building a Supportive Work Environment for Bus Drivers
The study identifies several structural factors perpetuating this pattern. Pay levels, while regionally competitive, increasingly fall short of international offers as global demand intensifies. Health and safety considerations remain inadequately addressed in some cities. Also, the sector should establish visible advancement opportunities—from driver to supervisor, trainer, or operations coordinator—that would position bus transport as a viable long-term career path.
Untapped Potential: Women and Youth
The research highlights two significant workforce segments that remain largely untapped across the region. Female participation in bus driver roles hovers near zero, despite successful integration models in other global markets. While some cities have begun to shift this – most notably Dubai and, more recently, Muscat, which have started deploying women as public-bus drivers – these remain early steps and not widely implemented. The limited scale of targeted recruitment efforts, gender-sensitive workplace policies, and supportive infrastructure may perpetuate this exclusion, representing a massive missed opportunity for workforce diversification.
Similarly, engagement with young workers remains minimal. Limited partnerships between operators and technical or vocational education institutions prevent the systematic development of locally-rooted talent pipelines. Young workers, who might be particularly adaptable to evolving transport technologies, remain absent from most recruitment strategies.
Several operators acknowledged this gap but cited cultural barriers and infrastructure limitations as obstacles. However, early pilots in select MENA cities demonstrate that with appropriate support systems—including dedicated facilities, flexible scheduling, and mentorship programs—both women and youth can successfully integrate into transport operations.
The Automation Factor
Adding another layer of complexity to workforce planning is the emergence of autonomous vehicle technologies. While full automation of bus operations remains years away, the technology’s development trajectory creates both risks and opportunities that operators can no longer ignore.
For operators heavily dependent on foreign drivers, automation could theoretically reduce vulnerability to global labour market pressures. However, this technological transition will require substantial workforce reskilling—from traditional driving to vehicle monitoring, system troubleshooting, maintenance, and enhanced passenger assistance roles.
Pathways Forward
The study concludes with a call for comprehensive workforce transformation rather than piecemeal solutions. Recommended strategies include:
Investing in local training ecosystems: Establishing certified training centres and vocational institutes that prepare candidates for both current operations and future technological requirements. These programs should combine traditional driving skills with digital literacy, customer service capabilities, and technical system understanding.
Improving career attractiveness: Implementing flexible scheduling models, family-friendly policies, and structured advancement pathways that position bus transport as a sustainable, professional career choice rather than transitional employment.
Diversifying recruitment: Developing targeted programs to engage women and youth through supportive workplace policies, mentorship initiatives, and partnerships with educational institutions.
Coordinated policy frameworks: Aligning workforce development investments with national economic strategies, ensuring that localisation efforts receive adequate support through training subsidies, regulatory incentives, and long-term planning mechanisms.
The research emphasises that these challenges, while significant, also represent strategic opportunities. Countries and operators that invest proactively in workforce transformation will build competitive advantages in service reliability, operational resilience, and alignment with urban mobility national development priorities.
A Regional Imperative
As urban populations across MENA continue growing and demand for public transport intensifies, workforce sustainability has moved from operational concern to strategic imperative. The current model—heavily dependent on external labour markets, vulnerable to global competition, and misaligned with regional policy priorities—cannot sustain the sector’s continued expansion.
The convergence of intensifying global competition, technological disruption, and national localisation mandates creates both urgency and opportunity for transformative action. Transport operators, policymakers, educational institutions, and workforce development agencies must collaborate to build resilient, locally-rooted workforces capable of delivering the reliable public transport services that MENA’s growing cities require.
The question is no longer whether change is needed, but whether regional stakeholders will act decisively to transform workforce models before current vulnerabilities translate into service disruptions affecting millions of daily commuters.
The research provides a roadmap that illustrates the primary leadership responsibility for each recommended action – whether led by public authorities, transport operators, or through joint collaboration.
While the exact implementation of these measures will vary based on local context, legal frameworks, and operational models, many recommendations inherently require coordinated efforts between government bodies, operators and industry stakeholders to drive innovative and sustainable workforce solutions.
