 My name is Philippe and I have the honor to moderate our today's panel. And ladies and gentlemen, this is a very important session. Why? If you open today the newspaper, if you look into the media, one thing is unfortunately pretty clear. The world is full of challenges, full of termites, be it politically or even here, geopolitical termites. And we know that people are worried. Worryed because of rising of populism, the question of future of the jobs, facing new technologies, and back in times there was always a promise of the economic system that the life of your children will be better than your own life. It was always motivating for the people. But now we do see a strong deterioration of trust, trust into our societal, political, but also economic system. However, we should not leave this room in these very bad mood and scenario. So we are the World Economic Forum, we are first optimistic and second always solution-oriented. And therefore allow me to turn now to our today high-level panel. We have here on my left side Dominic Barton, Dominic Barton, this global magic partner of McKinsey and company and at the same time our co-chair of this Middle Eastern Africa summit, Dominic, a warm welcome. We have here Majid Jafar. He's also co-chair of our summit this year and he's CEO of Christian Petroleum, UAE, Majid, warm welcome to you as well. Hayat Sindhi. She is the CEO of ITU institution from National Geographic Society in the US, but I think we will hear quite a lot more. And we have here Excellency Ghassan Hasbani, Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister in Lebanon. And last but not least our friend Basem Avdala. He's the CEO of Tomo Advisory, but at the same time our respected chair of our regional strategy group for Middle East, North Africa of the World Economic Forum. Ladies and gentlemen, please a big hand to our today's high-level panelists. And our founder and executive chairman Professor Schwab recently shared a call with the global community that we have to discuss the global economic system. So let's start and allow me that I first ask his Excellency, Deputy Prime Minister of Lebanon, Ghassan Hasbani, what are your thoughts so that we can seek together towards human-centric growth? Excellency. Thank you and good afternoon everyone. Well, if we look back a little bit just to put things into perspective, the world has gone or had gone through major shifts between the 19th century and the 20th century. The world had many economic models and political models prior to the second and the first world wars. They all competed together. They had liberalism, socialism, royalism, nationalism, all sorts of different models that were competing. It was characterized by empires and large global governance systems and ruled in different with different models. In the 20th century with the two major wars, there were mega shifts in the way society organized itself and learned from past mistakes. And those systems converged into two major opposing and polarized ideologies and systems competing with each other throughout the century. Capitalism and communism to a large extent, calling them with the two extreme names without getting a dilution in between. And many forms of them manifested themselves around the world in governance models, in economic models, in ideologies, etc. Both systems exhibited to a large extent certain failures. They failed to address the aspirations of the people. Nation-states also characterized the 20th century from big empires to nation-states to cross-national collaboration. So these models were all competing. Now we're seeing a shift, a correction to a large extent and that correction is manifesting itself violently through shifts towards more populism Globalization, telecommunications, communications created a much, much higher degree of visibility and accountability. So the reaction to the existing systems that did not fulfill the aspirations of people have become also extreme and this is what we're witnessing today. So it's very likely that the world is converging towards a new system. What will this system look like with post-globalization era, with fourth industrial revolution coming along, with the visibility and accountability increasing? We are certainly facing a high probability that the system will continue to be based on a free-market economy model but it has to shift much strongly towards a socially responsible and socially inclusive free-market economy beyond the cliché and more into action to be able to achieve a sustainable development through inclusion going forward. Thank you, Excellency. Let me turn now to the private sector, Dominic. So having heard now the Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, and talking about economic system and social inclusion, is there sometimes warning for the private sector? What does it mean for the economic system from your perspective? Well, thank you and just maybe building off the Deputy Prime Minister's sort of mosaic of how the house systems have changed. I think that there are some very significant implications now for business leaders. I think we've always had a view that we should just focus on the business of business, right? Milton Friedman had this phrase in 1971, which was very powerful at the time, the business of business is business. Do not spend an iota of your time on anything else. Your job is to create products and services and hopefully pay as little taxes. That was kind of the hardcore, if I could call it, capitalism. And that system doesn't work. I mean, I think we're just in that capitalist side, it has to change. And I say this, I've joked to you about this before, we're called a lot of nasty names in McKinsey and we deserve them, but one of the ones I like is we're known as the Jesuits of capitalism, right? So I actually believe in the system, but that system has also gone through changes. It's not being one system. And if I might say, my punchline, because I want to talk for too long here, is basically the capitalist system has to go back to its roots, which actually was a much more inclusive long-term model, some colleagues like Alain are onto. It is a inclusive long-term system. What's happened over the last 30 years has become very short-term. How am I doing on the quarter? It makes it very difficult to invest, do the R&D, build the human talent, think about trust in the community that you're in. So it's become very short-term and it's become very selfish. And so while globalization and Professor Schwab has been wonderful and lifting literally a billion people out of poverty, what we forgot about are the people that were dislocated in that system. So it's easy for people like me, McKinsey, we benefit from globalization big time. We're helping organizations do it, but there are people displaced from it. What I worry about looking ahead is that the challenges are going to get worse. With automation coming in, we believe that 40% of all jobs today in the, if I could call it, the developed world will be automated in the next 10 years. So the displacement from that is going to be much more significant than it is from globalization. If we just stand by and go, oh well, that's what happens, I don't know what the new system will be. It'll probably be some new system which I don't think any of us will like. So the long-winded view is that we have to be more inclusive and we have to be more long-term or we won't have this system around. Thank you for this really clear statement. Let's move from the global perspective to the more regional perspective, still talking about responsibility of business. Margie, you're well known as a very responsible leader and against way beyond your focused business model. So what is your thought in terms of towards human-centric growth? Thank you. So I think that it's actually a false dichotomy to think about what's good for the business and what's good for everything else in society because it is about our businesses being sustainable. If we don't address these other issues, we don't have a sustainable future because it's not just our employees and our customers and the whole society in which we operate. Here in the region, we have some major issues and they're well known. We've been talking about them for quite some time. Some of them have become even more acute crises because of conflict and it's the type of growth. I mean, it's notable that countries like Egypt were growing at 5-6% per year before the Arab Spring, but it was not trickling down. It was not actually inclusive growth. The difference in our region, unlike Southern Europe or other places, we don't have a social safety net. We have 60-80% of formal employment in our region is in the public sector. I mean, that's just staggering and unsustainable. And then the female participation in the labour force is one-third that of the male. And this is not a moral issue, it's an economic issue. That's more than half the workforce and the more productive half as well. And you're not going to tackle other demographic issues like the high population growth rate unless you tackle that as well. Turning to our role, so the Regional Business Council of the World Economic Forum, it's 40 or so member companies, very progressive and proactive from across the region. And we've looked at the key challenge of youth unemployment from both directions, from the bottom up and the top down. So what is it? I mean, like everywhere, it's a supply and demand problem. So the demand issue, we don't have enough investment and growth. What are the things, and governments in the region keep asking the private sector to do more, invest more, employ more. So we did a one-year study and there was a lot of interviews and analysis. What are some key things that the private sector from the region needs which can be done more easily than generational reforms like education, making it easier to register a company, a bankruptcy law, dispute, contractual dispute resolution, capacity in governments for managing them. And six of them in total. It's called the Actionable Policy Reforms Initiative. It's on the forum website. I invite you to see it. We launched it at the annual meeting in Davos. Here we're having meetings between the CEOs and the ministers from the region to look at how to actually measure performance against and implement these. Then from the bottom up, actual investments by companies in upskilling young people. It's called the New Vision for Arab Employment. Every company pledged, our own company pledged to start with 10,000 and then we've doubled that young people with English language skills which is found to be a key driver of employability worldwide, the number one factor actually, despite what the French might say about the English language. And we did that with online platforms. Actually from Jordan, the Queen Rania Foundation's IDRAC platform for MOOCs. And we're scaling that out beyond just our own areas of operation like Iraq and Egypt across the region. As a group of companies, I mean the whole regional business council, we've exceeded now the original target 100,000, we're close to 200,000 and we're going to half a million and then one million. Pretty quickly and then different companies are doing it in different ways. So that's how we've been engaging on that core issue. Thank you and thank you for giving us some hope here. Are there actions in the region? And we do have some other actions which gives us hope on a global level. Let's talk about the SDGs for a moment and I would like to ask Hayat really as a well-known expert on this area what can you say us to give us more hope based on the SDG process on a global level? Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, salam alaikum. Thank you. Actually so far I heard the very encouraging words from all of you. I heard inspiration, globalization, sustainability and public sector. A few years ago the future of Global Citizen was written by Michael Adam. He considered many responsibilities that would change our behavior, especially the world is becoming smaller and also we connected 24 hours, especially our responsibility as women. For women it's getting tougher for globalization. I know globalization has its fruits but also it has a problem. One of them it will be too many needs, too many choices, too many wants, make it very tough to choose a lifestyle and a career. And also with globalization many companies now are outsourcing for and granting competition for low income labor and that's not good also for developing world. So I believe science, technology and innovation is the solution for ecosystem of growth and this is not my saying only, this is the whole world after STG's last year, two years ago in September. Whereas the new path was illuminated by the painting of STG's sustainable developing goals with asking STI, Science, Technology and Innovation to be its core. Yes we have a business part of it, political but without STI we cannot face our conquer hunger, poverty, clean water, agriculture for security, empowering of women, climate change, good health and we have the history to prove it, we need scientific data, we need an ethical mind and out of the box type of solutions. For example now we tend and STI is good for our planet, for our as a human and also for business now we're tending sand to a silicon chip. We have paperless technology so we are really looking after a forest. We have now technology from atoms without radiation. We have now a new industry 4.0 automated artificial intelligence to do many things cleaning, cooking and even cars. And also one of the most important things how I can link society with science, social innovation, we need to embed it, the tool of science and technology with the endogenous people so they can be their own creative for their own problem and you know because science was born to solve problems. Thank you. And last but not least Bassem, so you are out of the region, out of Jordan. You are an observer of I guess the reform course here and bringing this together with a global perspective, the global discussion as well again, regional, how can we achieve more human centric growth? Thank you for the question. Globally as you mentioned, since the end of the world, the second world war we have witnessed unprecedented global development and progress. Yes of course one billion people were lifted out of poverty, better health, education and services were globally availed and many lives were enriched and improved. But the truth is that many were left behind, way too many were left behind. This debate has intensified obviously over the last ten years with the focus on the most appropriate ecosystem that would promote growth and progress and as you asked I would like to concentrate on the Middle East and North Africa region as it pertains to this question. For the last 30 years at least the Middle East and North Africa region has failed to devise and sustain a system that promotes development and growth. This has left a huge citizenry out of the system feeling that it has neither access nor opportunity and has left them wanting to have a stake in the system. If you look at three factors, first of all with political and economic participation this has been largely concentrated and largely restricted to everybody. This has resulted in this general feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement. Second of all the levels of services provided by governments in ranging from health to education to housing to other services have been far from adequate. 57 million Arabs are illiterate. 33 million Arabs live under the poverty line. Half of women have not attained any form of secondary education. We spend half of the global average on health and half of our eligible workforce is in the labour force today. So when you look at this situation you draw lessons from the past and you try to think of ways for the future. You really need to think about devising a new economic paradigm for this region. We do have our structural challenges which are very characteristic of other regions other developing regions in the world but I think this MENA region is also particular in terms of the severe cost that we are paying as a result of wars and terror and the severe human cost of dislocation and refugees who are dislocated from their houses. 65 million refugees who live in this region. So it is incumbent upon us to devise a restructuring transformational plan that would lead us to inclusive growth in this region. One that would actually bring back the people of this region to become active contributors, positive contributors to peace, development and prosperity. When you think about this reconstruction plan some estimates put it at over 800 billion dollars. In fact I would dare to venture and say it needs multiples of this figure because we are looking at growth not just mere sustenance but if I may I should say that this plan this reconstruction plan needs to also address other issues. The region and the global community must accept that the pillars of any plan for this region for inclusive growth, for social cohesion needs to address creating an inclusive fair democratic government system that guarantees freedoms and provides good quality health, education and housing. Second of all you need to promote a private sector that can sustain this growth through innovation through technology, through entrepreneurship and through market access because we cannot live and the private sector cannot actually thrive without market access. And third of all you need to establish an economic block in this region that is built on linkages of trade of shared infrastructure of energy and water and technology. These are three pillars that must be addressed when you think about inclusive growth in this region and there is really no time to waste because the fragility of the economy and the problems that we face right now regardless of the debate taking place globally on which choice to make we need to devise our own new paradigm for this region. Thank you Bassem, thank you for your engaged call and that leads again back to politics. Excellent to the Deputy Prime Minister but coming from the private sector before now being the role as a Deputy Prime Minister and at the same time Health Minister just listening to Bassem. So what would you say health and inclusion no one left behind? What are your concrete ideas the role to play as a politician in this context? Well I would go even further back to my engineering roots. Look at basically engineering models and model them onto economic and social models. To bring stability to a system you get a period of instability and you shift from one direction to the other violently and extremely by adjusting the extremes all the way down to finding the stable point in the middle. And here going back to the bigger picture in order to get this kind of stability established and have this inclusion in place we need to start thinking slightly differently from what we used to think before in different ways completely out of the box. For sure you need to have a common denominator that sets the social and economic prosperity of people at a certain level. And that needs to be adjusted either through job creation but job creation requires economic growth automation it removes jobs you need to find new jobs. So basically what we're looking at here is simply the tools are changing. So there's a mass re-skilling and mass development required and it's a generational shift that we're looking at. Healthcare is at the heart of social inclusion here. It's quite important to make sure that people receive the right level of care particularly as the population starts aging. Secondly housing is also important as you rightly mentioned because of the youth population that enters into the productive years and needs to be housed and build families etc and this is the main social unit. So all of these are core areas that need to be addressed as an immediate need for social inclusion. How can you achieve that? Governments on their own cannot take full responsibility for that. There's a huge amount of value that is generated out of growth by the private sector. Partnership models, collaboration models thinking together, planning together acting together and spending together. So if we can't get to this highly collaborative approach between private sector, public sector and more importantly civil society that has also an equal responsibility to creating that inclusive environment. We won't be able to make the shift from a world that had been pushing for a long time for liberty and efficiency in economic model liberty in political models to dilute that back down to a more stable environment that has the community in mind and some kind of equity included in that at the basic common denominator for social stability. And we need to create that without having to go through a violent shift towards extreme community and equity which sets us back 100 years or more. We need to figure that out very quickly and minimize that stabilization shift to get to the middle stable point within the next couple of decades and that's the chance that we have. That's the chance that our parents had between 1914 and 1945. So we don't have much time to actually create that shift and stabilize the model. Thank you Deputy Prime Minister. We just heard from you the question of public private cooperation and Dominic you're well known and your company for advising even governments in the region here. Let's talk about Saudi Vision 2030 we do know it's about diversification of the economy but is it also about making it more inclusive having more participation of the people of the economy and society. That's my question to you. Yeah I think it's essential because it's about its inclusive growth and where it goes. One thing by the way I want to make very clear about the Saudi work which I think is I think the Saudi 2030 program that the Deputy Crown Prince and leadership have put in place is wonderful. We're a bricklayer in that building so I do not want us taking any credit at all for that vision which was done by the Deputy Crown Prince. It's very important to get that across. We'd love to take credit we don't deserve it. It's a system but what I like about that system is that it is what you said inclusive it's thinking about creating jobs. I think this idea of even thinking about growth we have to be careful about that. Growth to me is not the fundamental driver it's how many jobs are you going to be creating in the system. I think that's what leaders have to start thinking about in countries. How do we create more jobs? We're seeing this in Canada. In another region where we're actually learning from what's been happening here it's how are we going to ensure that 9 million Canadians who in 15 years from now may be automated will have jobs. That's the focus of what government needs to and that means you have to think about education education for employment not education for education's sake. It means that businesses have to think about re-educating and re-skilling their workforce. I think this is a it's extremely important I think for governments if they want to remain stable they have to think about job creation re-skilling over time and businesses have a really important role in playing that. We can't assume it's going to be solved and if we do we're in trouble. I fully agree and I think that was the right buzzword talking about jobs, education and skills and sake into mudgits. We've got mudgits well known as a spare head of asking always fighting for economic reforms in the region. You just mentioned your initiative of the regional business council in terms of education but facing the forced industrial revolution and what just heard from Dominic Robert, artificial intelligence so is there any way to speed up the region maybe to leapfrog entire economic and so vocational developments? Yeah it's a great question and I think you know this whole idea of the fourth industrial revolution and the technological advances and you know many people look at our region and say come on what are you talking about we have wars we have bigger problems it sounds like trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic but actually if you look beneath the hype there is that opportunity just take the refugee situation giving them credit for payment to be able to purchase things that's happening through technology now very effectively as well as biometrics and identification. Education delivery how do you educate a whole generation of millions of Syrian kids who have been out of the formal school system if you lose an adult from employment for a few years they can get a job again if you lose a child from education for five years that's it so using technology I mentioned the MOOCs and how we're doing the upskilling that's another area so I think there are government service delivery at the end of the day legitimacy which is key for governments if we're talking about inclusive growth comes from effectiveness of institutions as well as accountability there's no point having elections in elections if you're not actually good on the service delivery I have to give a plug to the UAE which is our home base for some of the innovations in that area so forward-looking future planning innovations ours and every government department embracing things like robots and drones with service delivery really infusing it into how even in the new cabinet I mean everybody found it interesting the minister of tolerance and minister of happiness the first ones in the world there's actually something core and critical behind that which is the UAE recognizing that even though it has great economic GDP growth and very low unemployment it has 90 plus percent expats and it needs to be looking at things like societal cohesion yes it has great tolerance but how does it achieve that and how does it continue to achieve that now with 10 million population and growing and the second biggest GDP and the most diversified of the major economies in the Arab world so it's really getting granular on what leads to that societal cohesion and satisfaction with citizens and residents thank you very much Hayat look into the room so we have here many business leaders policy makers, leaders of the civil society and now it's a unique opportunity for you maybe to ask them maybe one point out of the SDGs or what is top on your mind in order to really achieve some human-centric growth here and for the region before I answer this I heard a very good phrase today no one believed behind no one believed behind exactly is the vision and mission of the sustainable development goals if you have goals and touching every aspect of lives and you have science and innovation on its core for sustainability definitely no one will be left behind you will have entrepreneurship civil society private sector women government inventors every aspect of society so for me to answer your question I think as a here in Middle East or the world it's different country has their own priority in theme of SDGs and I would say the most important one for me is partnership how really we are going to partner together because some of us has certain needs and the other could help for example biotechnology, industrial biotechnology is an amazing opportunities for other like country can step in help other country good business, good infrastructure good connectivity by having good partnership I think one of the main key things that also is a universal it will die and he also is here any political or any conflict because we all here in one planet we have to really look after it and also I wanted to say we really need also to give the lead for women to be in a scientific leadership not just to be as head of institutions this is not what I'm after I'm talking here how we can direct innovation in different way you know we need to have the voice of a man and a woman for example if we have more women directing the innovation we will have less fast cars I know people won't say that but we will have less we will have nuclear weapon we will have cure for cancer maybe accelerated will be you have cure for many things who designed the bullet for protection a man but who designed the shield for protection for the bullet is a woman who designed the airbags as a man but who designed the side airbags is a woman so we need both mind to direct science to make it attractive for the new generation the empathy emotion as a compass is been missing from our society thank you very much so many colleagues have touched on this we are right to say that the Middle East Africa region is a hotspot of challenges so please encourage us is there even enough time to solve all the different challenges at the same time what is your day to day observation look first of all if reform was easy it would have been done a long time ago so it's not an easy task but I have to tell you from my own modest experience looking at Jordan Jordan started reform in 1989 as a result of a financial crisis so it's almost 27 years ago in my mind I divided into three periods each one of roughly about nine years and at the level of success achieved in Jordan were in the years between probably 1999 to about 2007 and the reason for that was because of reform was looked at as a comprehensive package it was not just limited to fiscal reform it was not just limited to introducing sales tax or to increasing revenue for the state it was a much more holistic comprehensive approach that dealt with educational reform allowing the private sector to participate in economic decision making and in ownership and in management that allowed for different areas of rural areas to come in and participate in the economic well-being of the state these are the years when Jordan achieved 7.5% on average of growth every year and these are the years when we actually started having social upward mobility for young kids who would go to the Princess Sumaya school and learn IT and enter into a new sector and then find a job afterwards and then get maybe 350 JDs as an entry level and then they would increase their salary two years later and they would be able to afford to get a car and then later to get a mortgage on an apartment and that's the way forward to give the youth this kind of hope that there is a better tomorrow and that they can actually have this social upward mobility through education and proper career so my point in brief is to say that yes there is a way out and there is a hope but we really need to make sure that we think about people first so it really is about human centric development and when we think about all these years and the lessons drawn from the past I think we need to focus on the healthcare that is provided to people the education that is provided to women and young kids and to allow everybody to have equal access you know people in public schools should have access to computer learning and should have access to English language and should have access to kindergartens and this should not be just for the bridge and just the people who can afford it so at the end of the day yes there is a way out we need the help of the global community but we also need to address ourselves to the issues that are extremely intrinsical and extremely structural in terms of the challenges the governance issue is very important but so is the comprehensiveness of the reform thank you very much Bassem so we almost come to an end but quite often people in the room or on the screen asking us a question okay that was a nice discussion but what is the impact what is the outcome so let's do the following I would like to ask each one of you one final question please make it pretty short what commitment would you make today what promise even would you like to turn into action turn into reality as soon as you are back in your office tomorrow or latest on Monday so let us start with a private sector from a global perspective Dominic well maybe just to get very specific to ourselves because we can talk about it but what do we do I'd say maybe two commitments one is we have one of the largest youth employment programs in the world we help mainly women single mothers in a three to five week period get jobs and I think what we need to do is scale that dramatically we're doing it in five countries in 47 cities I'd like to see us doing it in 15 countries and 100 cities that's on the first dimension a second as you said we do have a privilege of being able to work with governments on reform programs and I take the last point about the holistic side that we're not just focusing in one area but we're helping provide perspective on the whole because it's the whole system and I think the more countries that do that the better so in our small way of participating we should make sure we have that holistic view and again are thinking about job growth cool thank you Dominic that sounds good and maybe I forgot to mention that it's live streamed and recorded so we can make you all accountable what you're promising now the day after Majid so while I'm sitting here a colleague one of our executive directors member of our board is sitting in a meeting in the Marriott looking at the next phase of the new vision for Arab employment and our new commitment to increasing on what we've already done in new innovative ways so as soon as I'm done here I look forward to hearing what we've pledged and keeping them accountable sounds good hi Ed being believing in science and technology my promise I will always always be consistent passionate and proud David Prime Minister well it's I promise to start on Tuesday actually not Monday is that okay it's okay but then speed up we'll be done something we've been talking about in the healthcare sector that's quite important getting a sustainable healthcare coverage universal with the contribution and participation of individuals and the private sector together with the government each element playing an active role in the design the funding and the execution so to bring that model of collaboration together into implementation for something that can be sustained over the next 50 years because that's how we're seeing the generation shift happening with people requiring more and more healthcare support and coverage and this is an issue throughout the region but we need to address it in Lebanon particularly and that's something we're going to be putting a lot of effort in so that we can have this design done within the next few weeks completed great sounds really good well I would like to go to Riyadh tomorrow and to raise a plea to the US president and to the all the 57 countries who are meeting there and to basically say that as important as it is to fight Daesh with war and with airstrikes it is probably more important to rescue this region through an economic new model that impacts the lives of people that's what we need but then that's really a perfect closing so our commitment at the World Up with Forum will remain committed as your platform for shaping the regional agenda and yes we started more on the gloomy end of the discussion but having heard now here the panel having known what is going on in the Arab startup community with the business leader leader of civil society I'm pretty optimistic so again thanks to the panel thanks for your commitment and promises and thanks to you for your attention