 country with an emphasis on target stakeholders, governance structures, resources, and the partnerships built as well as the main achievements of each good practice. The section on good practices highlights the role of innovation champions and the inspiration behind driving change wherever they are located. So the report also offers an overview of the opportunities inherent in accelerating digital transformation in the countries in the Arab region. It provides an understanding of the critical enablers and linkages between a need to foster ICT-centric innovation in the region, and examines good practices that can serve as a basis for strengthening digital innovation ecosystems. It also promotes regional and international cooperation and partnerships in building ICT-centric ecosystems. So also the reason why we worked on this report is that it is quite relevant to achieving the SDGs. It is also an implementation of the World Telecommunications Development Conference 2017 Buenos Aires Action Plan in which there is a regional initiative relevant to innovation and entrepreneurship. It's also relevant to even the Secretary General's common agenda that was recently announced, which has a pillar relevant to bridging digital divide. Next slide, please. So the report focuses mainly on the three engines of growth, ICT technology ecosystems, innovation ecosystems, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. And it does an assessment basically arguing that there's a need for building or focusing on the middle area, ICT-centric innovation ecosystems, combining the three engines of growth. And through this analysis, we can see that the rankings of countries in the three engines of growth shows that the countries in the Gulf, particularly Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, have better performing engines of growth than the other Arab dominated areas like North Africa. Countries such as Sudan, Yemen, and Muaythana occupy lower positions in the rankings and thus would most likely have fragile ICT-centric innovation ecosystems. All the details, of course, can be found in the report. Next slide, please. Now, as you are all aware, COVID-19 had a big impact globally, not just on the health sector, but also it affected the digital transformation in a probably a positive way. More governments are scrambling and are planning to and investing a lot to digitally transform. And so, but as a result, there is a growing digital divide as well for countries being, countries and segments of societies being left behind. So, for instance, it moved, I mean, Alban, for instance, moved to lift restrictions on Zoom, Microsoft Office, and Google Meet, Qatar lifted restrictions on Microsoft Teams and WebEx and other countries such as the UAE, and temporarily lifted restrictions on Zoom and Microsoft Teams to enable remote working and remote schooling options. And these are just small examples of how countries try to adopt solutions to basically live a normal life within COVID. The report touches a lot about some of the measures as well relevant to tackling the COVID crisis from an innovation perspective. Next slide. Now, as mentioned, the report features a number of good practices. This is not an exhaustive list, but it is a list that includes examples from different levels of countries across the regions. So we have countries that are lower income countries, middle income countries, as well as richer income countries. And so in this panel, we have representatives of some of the stakeholders featured in the report. So we look forward, obviously, to learning about their experience. And we hope that you will find the experiences of all these good practices relevant to your country or your region. Next slide, please. So in analyzing basically the situation regionally, the report talks about our focuses on seven enablers of digital transformation, vision and strategy, infrastructure programs, talent and champions, capital resources, markets and networks, culture and communities, regulations and policy. And so vibrant ecosystems that are envy of other countries require culture where stakeholders organically leverage existing resources and continuously update their policies and programs to remain competitive. Building an innovation culture at the country level is a journey. Ecosystems go through stages of development and these stages, every stakeholder has actions they must take and roles they must play. In many of the Arab countries, the innovators are still struggling. The ingredients needed to facilitate this journey are often missing. Without the required support, they are unable to compete on a regional scale, let alone globally contributing to a growing digital divide, but both within and between countries. To close this gap, it is necessary to provide stakeholders such as policy makers, private sector executives and entrepreneurs with evidence-based guidance relevant to the regions, enabling them to design innovation policies and programs for their organizations and countries. A mix of different stakeholders is different when it comes to the digital ecosystem in the Arab region. The ecosystem is populated by both good and average stakeholders creating a strong digital ecosystem in some countries and a mediocre one in others. The region exhibits a wide disparity in levels of development in all the areas, thus making it difficult to develop single, one-size-fit-all types of strategies for ecosystem development. Some countries are characterized by excellent ecosystem dynamics and are world leaders in various indices, whereas others, some others languish at the very bottom of those indices. Next slide please. So as highlighted, maybe when I was going through the COVID side, there's a growing digital innovation divide as well. The pandemic has further deepened the digital divide between and within the countries. The divide is visible on multiple outlines, first between those who have access to technology, infrastructure and enabling laws, and those who do not. It is also evident between those who live in an environment where entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems are conducive to and supportive of entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises. And those who live in environments where red tape bureaucracy and other hurdles prevent entrepreneurs from taking initiatives and exploring benefits stemming from the accelerated digital transformation bought about by COVID-19. Next slide please. And so some of the key takeaways provided in the report is that more coordination at the national level is required between all the relevant stakeholders of the ecosystem. Cooperation between those stakeholders and within and across borders as well is important to focus on developing digital innovation systems with key international stakeholders, organically building innovation capacity and scaling up the impact and sustainability of national initiatives. Of course homegrown digital innovations systems that create system a systematic impact are basically what is what is basically recommended to try to foster on on the national level for all countries. Next slide please. And so finally in conclusion, the key opportunities provided by this report are areas that are linked to governance, linkages, capacity building and focus creating the digital innovation ecosystem to avoid innovation migration is quite important and interaction between top down policy and bottom up individuals are better policies for better policies. This is what the report concludes and recommends. Next slide please. If you have any questions or comments happy to answer them in this session or please feel free to reach out to us by email. Hopefully when the report is officially out we will be tweeting about it through the ITU Arab Asian Office account and hopefully global accounts as well. So stay tuned for that within the coming short period. Thank you very much. Thank you Karim. This is a very nice summary of the big report so we have an idea of what to expect now in this report and without any further due I would now turn on to the panelists and maybe we will have a bit of short discussion about the ecosystem in the Arab region in general and then also what it mentioned in the report in terms of the engines of growth. So maybe I will invite Mr. Hassan and to invite him to tell us what is your impression Mr. Hassan about those three engines of growth that you have seen here technology ecosystem, innovation ecosystem and entrepreneurial ecosystem. How are they performing let's say in the Arab region and is there like any parallel between how they are performing in the Arab region and how what's happening in the Kuwait ecosystem. Well first of all congratulations Mounira and ITU team for launching this important report especially during COVID-19 now. We need more than ever we need a more a better ecosystem that would nurture and help entrepreneurs to thrive in really especially in the context of developing countries and the Arab world. We usually I had a look about and thanks Karim for your highlights regarding the report. We have different indices that would offer us some insights about the innovation and the entrepreneurship ecosystem in the Arab world. Unfortunately some data are missing however we cannot from a standpoint of view we can't put all the Arab world countries in the same ruler which means that here we have oil region oil-based economies such as Gulf countries such as Qatar Emirates Kuwait and so on. We have unstable political countries do as you know since 10 years ago because of what's called the Arab Spring. Also we have countries that they suffer from social issues and we have an increasing population and so on. So we can't you know we can put the Arab countries in the same for the same indices however what can we say is that there is some significant improvements in some countries such as Gulf countries in terms of innovation and the ecosystem with the entrepreneurial ecosystem. However we still need as I have noticed from different global indices we still need to attract more talents to the region because as you know innovation does not or ideas don't turn into innovation by itself. We need people who can nurture and who can turn those ideas into successful entrepreneurial stories. So that's basically my first impression. We were lucky here in Kuwait to launch the first global entrepreneurship monitor. This report started back in 1999. It offers a comprehensive dataset about entrepreneurial activity, attitudes, perception and the national ecosystem for a certain economy. We were lucky to launch the first report here in Kuwait this year and if you may allow me I would like to share one slide and by the way if you are interested to look at the report I have shared with you the link in the swap card. This is the website for the global entrepreneurship monitor and the link was shared in the swap card for the audience. This is a snapshot of Kuwait entrepreneurial framework conditions and the comparison among MENA countries which includes Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Morocco and Iran. And how do we calculate this data and how do we measure the entrepreneurial environment? Basically we interview 36 experts from the same country who can give us their perception about how does a certain economy such as Kuwait perform in terms of for example entrepreneurial finance, government policies and so on. So the green line we noticed that this is the average for the MENA countries, the participated economies. Here in Kuwait we noticed that they have significant areas that they need to focus on such as government policies that would support entrepreneurs. Also we have the government programs and the school programs that would help young individuals or young people to you know to reduce fear of failure or to have entrepreneurial skills. Also there is a lack of research and development transfer and also there is some rigid regulations which Mr. Kaleem has highlighted in the report that you have just launched. From the other side we see that there are some good indicators such as here in Kuwait we have a good culture about entrepreneurship. We have also to some extent a good physical infrastructure and services to entrepreneurship. Also we have also commercial and professional infrastructure and also here because most GCC except Kuwait here they started to have taxes on businesses. Kuwait they supposed to have what's called the bad value added taxes soon so we still know how to what extent Kuwait this will affect entrepreneurs. We hope that we will do more research about it in the future. So generally speaking we see that the Arab world region they are still lag behind other developed countries but we see that there are some insights some good stories we've heard for example about Swifle in Egypt they reached the unicorn we've heard about Talabad we've heard about flowers they entered the UK market selling flowers and gifts so there are some good examples about some you know growing companies here in the region. However generally speaking we still there are we still need to do much work especially from policymakers who can improve that entrepreneurial ecosystem for the Arab region. Thank you. Thank you Hassan this was very comprehensive. Now I will you rightly mentioned about the talent in the very beginning that the region needs to attract talent. You will also see in the report that one of the hubs of talent are located according to reports in Egypt because they have 500 000 graduates every I think yeah if I'm not mistaken and also there are other hubs where the talent is like focused and so in the Arab region definitely there are hubs where the talent is missing but there are areas where you can actually pull from talent. So thank you very much. I will turn into Megan now. Megan what do you think about the three engines of growth in Arab region and maybe you can relate it to Palestine and Pita's example specifically. Yes definitely well thank you Munira and thank you Hassan. Actually what Hassan has provided was really comprehensive. I was searching for Palestine in the MENA map. Well for Palestine since there's a lot and not a lot of information about it Palestine has been working really hard through the past actually two years including the COVID-19 year towards putting itself on the digital map the worldwide digital map concerning it has made lots of initiatives that are related towards the creation of an entrepreneurial ecosystem that supports Palestinian youth since they're considered to be the let's say a very important element for economic growth. There are lots of players in the Palestinian marketplace that have put their hands together in order to establish this ecosystem in Palestine including the private sector the public sector also. For example we have the Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Innovation or Empowerment. It was recently established in Palestine to start working for or initiating an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Palestine with the help of several key stakeholders that might be interested in this topic. We have also the government in general they are working towards in their national policy agenda towards the integration of these youth and entrepreneurs better in the Palestinian marketplace mainly the ICT sector. There's also the Ministry of IT and Telecom who are working really hard in this approach. Another thing I can talk about is the let's say the creation of an ICT cluster in Palestine which is being currently established by the Prime Minister's office in order to support the ICT sector and in order to let's say serve the ICT sector to its best interests. Another thing I can talk about for innovation entrepreneurship in Palestine since I work with Pikti which is the Palestinian information and communication technology incubator. We have done lots of initiatives during these years in order to increase the inclusion of those youth and as entrepreneurs both females and males in the Palestinian marketplace and learn from neighboring and international countries. We were a pilot we have done pilot things in Palestine such as the importance of technology integration in various economic sectors including the agricultural sector, the tourism sector, the health sector and the educational sector. Since these let's say most importantly the health and the educational sectors were mostly affected during the COVID-19 epidemic. As for innovation we are working really hard towards digital for development that is the use of technology in various economic sectors not only let's say supporting youth who have IT or pure IT solutions, software applications and so on. We are working towards the integration of IT as a tool in these sectors and we have done lots of initiatives that support this and we're still doing it since it's new in Palestine and we're working really hard. Thank you. Thank you Megan, thank you for this you know comprehensive summary of initiatives in Palestine and we see that the ecosystem is you know starting to move in the right direction and there are so many stakeholders which are you know appearing and growing so I really hope that soon we will be seeing Palestine in the map of different engines of growth too. Now maybe I will turn to Mr. Salih. Salih you are so young and you're just doing your master's degree now but we know that you have created one of the you know seller examples of the incubator located in Iraq called Mosul Space that caught attention of a lot of international organizations including ITU, I saw you work with UN and other international organizations so could you tell us a little bit about how it happened and then how Mosul Space is contributing to development of the ecosystem in Iraq? Yeah thank you Munira. Actually Mosul Space started in 2014 when I was like student in the university and I realized that like the gap between what's the market need and what's the education level and methodology inside the universities in Iraq. So at that time I'm trying to find a solution for like fixing this for me and for my like colleague. I tried to change like a little bit in the department that I was studying in but then it's not working you know like the bureaucracy and how was like people in such systems looking for a small tennis student. Yeah so then we initiate like kind of the Katronica Club. We expanded to Makar space and then this Makar space has now like innovation hub with different tools and tech machines with co-working area and incubation programs and and big community of young people who are trusting in this community and trying to like get a benefit from it and also offering value for the community. Here is very important how is like in in such countries in Iraq where there is like an instability in the security and in the political system that the most of the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem was created because of initiatives from young people. Most of them are from the country and there is also other people coming from different countries with support of international donors and NGOs to initiate this ecosystem. So now after the early stage initiatives started from like the 12th and then we started in 2014 there is innovation for development national wider program started 2015 and then many programs are starting. The result we have now like different people starting like maybe small businesses sometimes on city level or national wide. The businesses that get funded and investment is more about like tick and logistic businesses and this is normal because investors want to put their money in such countries in something more ticky than having like big asset on on the ground because you know it's not very stable but the interesting things that till now we don't have like such a big initiatives to to make it easier for for entrepreneurs from the regulation perspective from the government side. So we are trying to work more investing in young people in in terms of mindset. So maybe for a future we hoping that people will ask like the citizen will ask government to have a regulation for businesses for investment to support that regulation in the state of asking them for having just government job as we've seen in the past two years. So this is this is how is the ecosystem starting and now we are trying to be more open to the region. There is also like very important initiatives like what are our like friends in capita and the station and other organization are doing on the like incubation and investment and different different stuff going mainly are coming from young people to other young people. Thank you so much it's very interesting and now continuing this conversation with you as I think you just mentioned very interesting fact that you realize that what university academia was producing as graduates did not match what was needed in the market. So this was quite an impressive let's say conclusion that you came up with and so you decided to fill that gap in a sense of and I created muscle space and gave young people an opportunity to to be creative in the muscle space so very interesting. Now what do you think then about the seven enablers of the digital transformation if you remember Karimini's presentation also mentioned talent and infrastructure and capital and and few other resources the enablers for the digital transformation. Is there any challenges in let's say Iraq regarding them and given the political situation and the political past of Iraq what are the challenges that you face given those of those seven enablers. Yeah actually we can talk about this enablers in in kind of level I will start in the first one is the let's say about the talent because we will back to the mindset the mindset of typical young Iraqi he will graduate from the university and has like on paper certificate without focusing on really like experience and knowledge because he thought that the government will hire him as a typical model because of the you know like the oil free money coming to this country so the government is taking this style and now this that's creating like a problem because universities in the Iraq is accepting most of people graduated from high school and putting them in the universities and then no one felt all people are graduated from that system and then they are going to look for a government job and to protest or anything but when you are looking to hire a talent talented people in really private sector where you are looking for a high competence so you can't find easily people you can like hire them directly so it's painful process when you are looking for talented people whereas the the mindset of people is looking just for for low income with the government so that's it is creating a very like a problem with with the talent there is another level of young people who are really working on them especially with with these online opportunities of like accessing different programs with different institute all around the world and the moxes so there is a lot of people investing in their self as an individual and some people also looking for studying outside the country and coming back to the country to contribute to this development when when when we're talking about the infrastructure also we are struggling because the structure in Iraq it's it's not very well developed or there's no high investment in the infrastructure in general like from 20 years ago so and and now the problem is most of the cities the infrastructure are damaged because of the war so for from my side from Mosul like till now we don't have the bridge between the two sides of the city rebuilt you see like we are ablated I don't know five years ago from the war yeah so so we are struggling also in in term of the technological infrastructure like we don't have like a very stable network or facilities for for having tech services in in this country very interesting thank you Salih this is this gives us like an interesting picture of at least two enablers like that you mentioned talents and then also infrastructure those are probably the biggest challenges that Iraq is probably facing at this moment thank you so much I will move to Megan Megan what are the challenges in Palestine regarding the seven enablers maybe you can give us a short summary yes thank you Salih actually Salih spotted the lights on some of the points that I wanted to also spot the lights on most importantly is the political situation in Palestine the infrastructure has definitely developed over the years and the telecommunications companies have done their best to let's say make households in Palestine have access to internet all of them and so on but unfortunately there are some political barriers that hinders us from let's say moving on and forward you may know that we have taken 3G since definitely I mean at least two years we have obtained the 3G whereas other countries they have gained 4G and 5G networks so this definitely depends on the political situation that we're actually living in addition to the talent unfortunately Palestine does have the according to say survey done Palestine does have a great talent that we also try to invest in it with several key stakeholders in order to have more qualified and professional let's say university graduates that can gain higher market opportunities but unfortunately there is still a gap between what the universities provide to those students and what the market needs and we have done lots of studies and lots of programs concerned this approach that is targeted towards how we can let's say decrease this gap and make a more matchmaking a more better and resourceful matchmaking process between what these students gain with the universities and what they need or what the companies actually need in the marketplace still there's a significant gap in this approach we're trying our best to do some much I mean we think a little bit I think this is a problem of 3G no Megan you're back so we can okay so shall I repeat no no no no this is perfectly clear thank you I think the challenges are a little bit similar in some ways what was also described so this gives us a better picture thank you and now to Hasan I think other speakers did not mention also the culture vision and strategy in a sense and maybe also the capital like of the seven enablers how is the situation in Kuwait with those things like is it is accessible capital easy what about vision and strategy do we have any tools in Kuwait to enable to enable digital transformation yes thank you Monira for the this is a really important question because just to remind the audience we have those seven enablers are really important for them for the entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem however the we all know it's obvious that the main priority for Arab region is political stability unfortunately many countries in the Arab region they suffer from politically they are not stable and I hope I have a dream in future that maybe I can go to Iraq by taking a train or to go to Damascus and go to Riyadh without visa without this is a really important for tenants to to move on as you know so we hope as a young Arab entrepreneur we all hope that we can have this kind of facilities where there is an easy for moving talents moving capital and in this case you will see more dynamic markets but talking about Kuwait going back to Kuwait and Gulf states or Gulf countries as you know they're basically they're firm they depend on oil Kuwait is among those Gulf countries Kuwait because of as you know unstable oil prices and because we had they had before for example 2008 2009 economic crisis they started they had an ambitious vision of 2035 to become a financial and the trade hub regionally and internationally by attract attracting foreign direct investments advancing the national human capital and rebalancing the labor market towards the private sector while Kuwait has promising diversification opportunity its ability to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth will depend on supporting the private sector and entrepreneurship for Kuwait this requires deep rooted structural adjustments across the political economy leading to the transfer of the private sector from unproductive rent seeking activities to what's called productive entrepreneurship activities contributing to economic growth diversification and job creation creation we had the chance to meet 30 more than 37 experts during when we launched the global entrepreneurship monitor for Kuwait and those experts indicated that in their comments that the key areas constraining Kuwait's entrepreneurial activity are we have the rigid government policies lack of financial support also and we have also low levels of entrepreneurial education at the same time we have high levels of corruption and labor costs so their recommendation key recommendation is to improve the context for entrepreneurial activity including developing the financial infrastructure also enhancing the government policies for entrepreneurs focusing on entrepreneurship education especially at the school stage and reinforce the commercial infrastructure and continue to invest in entrepreneurial values and culture so this is a snapshot about Kuwait and the Arab region thank you. Thank you Hassan this gives us like a more complete picture and before moving on to the next round of questions I would like to encourage the audience if you have any questions to the panelists please send the questions so we will start reading the questions out hopefully in about seven to ten minutes so we will have a very short window to answer the questions now I will go back to you again Hassan to continue the conversation so what are those blueprints that you have observed regarding key practices filming the innovation journey and success stories is there any success stories that you can tell us about very shortly. Well let's talk for example about flowered before COVID-19 they were serving two cities in the Arab region I think Kuwait and Riyadh now after our during COVID-19 because we still are suffering from some countries are suffering flowered serves more than 20 cities in the Arab world and also in UK flowered basically it's a platform online platform that where you can buy flowers and you can buy also gifts for your lovers or for your friends and so on and this is a really good success story as you know many you know small and medium enterprises they closed their businesses during COVID-19 because they couldn't survive however because we are talking about here this is the forum it's about innovation and digital transformation we see there is a growth for many companies who focus on e-commerce and online platform they have a significant or they had significant growth during the pandemic so that was really some of the success stories that we have on the other hand we noticed that people including academics and policymakers in the Arab region they have become more aware of the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation to contribute to economic growth and diversifications as we mentioned earlier we see we noticed that Gulf states they are now they have the blueprints or the vision for having more economic diversification including Saudi Arabia Qatar and United States United Arab Emirates regarding some initiatives that has that have been done by the Kuwaiti government they have adapted several policies to support and develop and promote entrepreneurship to more more sustainable model for example the ministry of commerce and industry they created a favorable more favorable regulatory environment such as establishing the national fund for SME development and reducing the commercial license processing time and fees also in 2030 the government Kuwaiti government initiated the Kuwait direct investment promotion authority Kadipa to enhance the investment environment for both foreign and local investors also the government they have also approved the 86 billion what's called silk city as you know the silk road between China and other countries mega projects and also the Mubarak Al Kabir port for the infrastructure although these implemented strategies or these blueprints that you have just mentioned are really important the private sectors still they have limited contribution in stimulating Kuwait's economic growth and improvement so we really need to have more to have more highlights and to have more focus on how to improve the entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem for the region and for Kuwait specifically thank you yeah thank you very much this is again a very interesting example of regulatory changes you know enabling that it's like a little bit top down like here in this conference we are talking about both sides top down where the it is led by the government but also a bottom up which is like led by entrepreneurs themselves and so it was a good example of the top down policies which enable a good environment let's say for entrepreneurship in Kuwaiti thank you thank you thank you thank you i will move on to mr sally what do you think mr sally from from the mussel space blueprint what is it how is it fueling the innovation journey and how how did you become a success story and what activities are you doing for entrepreneurs let's say and entrepreneurship ecosystem in iraq there's mussel space you're new at the beginning yeah the first thing is is our approach like mussel space approach is to invest in in the young people in young mindset in order to make a change on the mindset level and then the return of investment that those people will will start a new project will be in position that they have the right mentality and right the mindset to to do a change on a bigger level so we are starting from very down from the young people and what's what we have been offering for like all these years is the different tick and business trainings like even have a small partnerships with like companies such as semen's and other companies to deliver a high technical trainings for young people also one of the interesting events that created the the core for the tick community in in my city in mussel was the iraq innovation hackathon this was national wide event like in partnership with different enablers in the ecosystem in different cities and we have people young people skilled that are working on solving problems related to education and recycling and they they still in the hall for two days to develop a solution and after that the important things that this solution is not to grow up to to be like sustainable from those young young people but the interesting that most of those young people are now working with different companies because of the experience and network they go and there is software development companies starting from two people just met in this event so this is this is how how we are trying to do to provide different components we are pushing the knowledge and the skills and networking and providing hub for all those people to do to start having success stories from those people and then we can promote these success stories to other young people to see that them the another way that is to depend on yourself and go with the like the logical word the private sector not just waiting for something to happen to you and also we we have been respond to the covet 19 we we we try to develop different to product and we have a research activities in our maker space and we produce like face shields and very small electronic part to prevent the separation of the covet 19 we did deliver it to the hospitals in the city and also we collaborate with different hubs in Iraq they are doing the same thing as a maker space yeah and and at the end we we are doing business incubators like each year we have an in a business incubator most of the times people coming with with on ideation level and then after this program they most of them are starting implementing and there is different type of startups focusing on culture on heritage there's one of the successful startup who tried to make small antiques for what's the ISIS destroy from the heritage of Iraq and he's selling nationwide in the Iraq and yeah there is also like people focusing on agriculture because we already have infrastructure for that and people using the technology for like you know like the logistic and e-commerce and business stuff very interesting yeah this is an example of a bottom-up approach where the ecosystem member is trying to change minds and inspire build networks among people so that change happens from from from that level thank you very interesting I have read a lot about also I saw the videos about the face shields that you created and distributed to the hospitals they were quite unique like kind of covering the whole face because you found that there was a problem in the market it was too difficult for them to wear masks it was hot or something so new from the need and that you deliver to the market so very interesting case yeah well done yes and and then last but not least Megan can you tell us maybe about Peter's blueprint blueprint for fulfilling innovation and success stories in Palestine and also I think if there is any other you know enabler that you probably wanted to mention you can also mention here and I saw probably that maybe you wanted to play a video about Peter if this is the case let us know yes I wanted to play a video about Pikti actually because Pikti is mostly related to entrepreneurs in Palestine should I share my screen no actually normally this would be shared by plenty yeah yeah thank you of the Palestinian youth and young people and build relations with foreign countries, whether Arab or foreign, to exchange experience and knowledge. There is also a quick spread of information technology and its use in our daily lives. You can find it under educational programs and the project that you will benefit from under its administration to spread awareness and increase awareness about the importance of technology and how to use it in our daily lives. And how to increase technology in other parts of the economy, as it is called in terms of parts. There was a group of programs that helped a group of national companies or start-ups, known as entrepreneurs, to develop their ideas and turn them into products and services that enter the Palestinian market. What you will use in the parts, because we talked about them, is tourism, the green parts and the financial parts, to transform everything in an innovative way. Thank you. Beautiful video. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Well, our way for spreading the entrepreneurial ecosystem or this period and innovation was culminated with several initiatives we have done within Pikti and in cooperation with Vita. We have led or we have done several initiatives that was targeted towards integration of technology in various sectors. We have, let's say, supported five start-ups in the agricultural sector. We are also supporting start-ups in the tourism sector to integrate technology in the tourism sector and, let's say, promote Palestine as a tourism destination for locally and internationally, in addition to the increase of women's inclusion in the ICT sector. This was culminated with the supporting of five women entrepreneurs in the ICT sector that have made business start-ups that serve various stakeholders within the Palestinian economy in our society, let's say. In addition to, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to increase the digital literacy, especially among women living in vulnerable areas and women households who had to help their children within their homes to know how to surf the internet, how to use the interactive learning techniques or how to surf the internet safely and how to combat sexual harassment electronically. So this was some sort of innovation on how to increase the youth and women's inclusion within the Palestinian society. In addition to having, I want to spotlight on Palestine Technology Week Extrudec, which would be taking place during December this year that will talk about the proliferation of the ICT sector all digital in addition to allowing a bunch of entrepreneurs and start-ups to come and present their ideas and the products and the services they provide in front of investors who might be interested in supporting them. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, very interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting initiatives that both organizations, PTI and PTA, are engaging. And I wanted to also let you know that within the ITU we also have the Arab Innovation and Entrepreneurship Network and a lot of incubators are members of that network. So I think our colleagues from IE and we'll reach out to both of you, Salih and Megan for the incubators and also for Hassan for the academia to maybe take part more like involved part in that network. We have really like two minutes left and we have maybe for 30 seconds you can give me your key takeaway from today's discussion starting with Megan maybe. Well, I really thank you for the opportunity to let me speak in this forum. It was my pleasure. It was nice to meet everyone and it was really nice sharing some thoughts all together and we hope that we might do something in the near future and cooperate for a better good. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Salih. Yeah, thank you. Actually the most important things from like the takeaway from today is the openness to the Arab region and to the other countries and to see how we have a similar challenge and how we can like balance between our own challenge and also looking for the other success stories of other countries and how is the regulation and strategy and also on your level and private sector level what are their performance and how we can like copy it and localize it for our countries. Thank you so much. Yeah, very, very. Thank you. How's that? I will quote David Odrich who had a meeting a few days ago. This is maybe probably the most important sentence I would highlight it to the audience and here I'm quoting ideas don't turn into innovations. It takes people to take those ideas and invest blood, sweat and tears and push them and carry them into innovations. End of quote. So people therefore it's our duty as teachers, academics and policymakers to nurture and educate our people especially for the Arab region. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for the invitation Monira and thank you ITU for giving us this opportunity to connect with such beautiful entrepreneurs. Thank you very much. Well, thank you on behalf of ITU and our organizing team I thank you for being here and sharing your insights and good practices in the Arab region. If you have chance to make sure that you download the report the Arabic version will be coming also shortly and for the audience I wanted to say that stay tuned for our next session on building competitive and innovative ICT centric ecosystems. So thank you again panelists and we hope to see you again in the coming events. Thank you. Thank you. So good morning. Good afternoon everyone. Just trying to open my camera. Appreciate it. So thank you very much. Excellent first session for the second day. On this session, I would like to welcome you all and welcome the distinguished speakers as they log in. I just want to make sure that all the speakers are online. I think they are. Excellent. So, so this session is an interesting one. This session will set the stage for renewed focus on capacity development to nurture entrepreneurship driven innovation in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. Competitive digital ecosystems are complex requiring new thinking, new approaches and new stakeholders who can develop the skills and expertise to take action and prepare their communities for potential crisis. So to give you an example of the new context the future of jobs 2020 report predicts continued skill gaps and high demand for skills worldwide as in demand skills across jobs change within the next five years. Top skills that employers will be looking out for to be critical thinking, analysis and problem solving as well as skills and self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. On average companies estimate that about 40% of workers were required re-skilling up to six months and 94% of business leaders report that they will expect employees to pick up new skills in the jobs. So it'd be interesting throughout the session to see how the Arab region should adapt and to build the capacities in light of these new circumstances or new contexts. We are glad that we have a number of distinguished speakers with us. I'll introduce them in a second but I remind you the distinguished audience that you can interact with this session on Swapcard using entering your questions and answers and hopefully at the end of the session we will try to have enough time to answer all your questions. Our distinguished panelists for this session are Mr. Waleed Ali from the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Qatar, Ms. Wazila Knative Director of Incubator Entrepreneurship and Training in Algeria, Mr. Carlos Machado Global Impact Institute Educational Consultant in Switzerland, Ms. Lama Zahir Beyond Group Innovation and Technology Consultant from Lebanon and Mr. Hassan Abu Saida from the Egyptian Space Agency in Egypt. So I'd like to welcome you all. Of course the full profiles of the distinguished speakers are available online feel free to interact with the speakers on Swapcard as I mentioned as well. So my first question is to Mr. Waleed can you please tell us about the capacity building in ecosystem development? Sure. Thank you Karim. Ladies and gentlemen, audience. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening depends on from where you are joining us. It's actually thank you for sharing the report this morning. I don't want to repeat what you have presented and I don't want to repeat what other speakers mentioned in the last few days about the importance of capacity building in developing ecosystems but for innovation to flourish actually all the players in the ecosystem should know their roles and should actually have collaboration and interactive activities between each other. So to reach this level we definitely need strategic capacity building initiatives and this will be very important for our innovation ecosystem because innovation ecosystem should be sustainable and the sustainability will come from the understanding of each role. So each stakeholder and players in the ecosystem should understand their role and should understand how to interactive or collaboratively among this ecosystem. So it's very important to have capacity building strategy and like you mentioned before and I would like to emphasize on that we don't have one size fits all capacity building strategy because we all saw that different countries have different innovation ecosystem at different stage so some countries already started building some countries exploring and some countries still out of the picture. So the way I see it that we should have like a three layer strategy, the global one which is currently the ITU academy is playing a very crucial role in educating and training people around the globe about innovation ecosystem building giving us the knowledge giving us the fundamentals giving us the tools that we need to use it the tools that we need to start building our innovation ecosystem. The second layer is the regional layer where countries can be grouped and categorized based on similar economies like factor like the GDBs and number of population and then they can work collaboratively and then after that they can help the less developed countries in the region. The third layer is the country level ecosystem capacity building where we know our ecosystem better and we know our area of improvement or room of improvement and then we can have this kind of capacity building strategy to equip our players especially that we saw that the focus right now is on the entrepreneurs and maybe young people that who are in this innovation ecosystem but we also need to focus on street level bureaucrats, government employees because we need to see more capacity building for those I'm talking about this specifically because I'm working in the government system so I know that government employees they need to be trained they need to have capacity building strategies and initiatives so they can also be active part in the ecosystem so excellent thank you very much from this framework of global region and national framework to focus on we lost you Wasila can you hear us clearly you lost me yes I hear you now sorry so I was asking to Wasila are there new paradigms in capacity building in Algeria or in the region from your side yes of course in fact capacity development in Algeria is at the center of its current strategy Algeria's actions in this area include capacity building in several interrelated activity sectors many of the capacity development challenge stem from the nature of the main development sectors and the different segments of society namely we have the first one is the diversity of the ecosystem at the local, regional and national levels and the interactions between the human communities and the ecosystem which has required capacity building action adapted to of course different geographical and social context. The second one is the multi sectoral dimension involving a capacity building in different sectors and segment of society and the third one it's the interdisciplinary character which has required increased capacity to integrate different scientific disciplines and social science. Algeria's capacity development policy takes into account three levels of capacity. The first one is the individual, the second one is the organization and the third one is the enabling environment which cover a political social, economic, legal and regulatory system in which the organization and the individual operate. And the framework also identified the key capacities that need to be developed in order to achieve specific objectives there is include the functional capacities needed to perform the key action related to the implementation of capacity building initiatives for a prosperous economy. Thank you. Excellent, so a very interesting perspective in Algeria which makes me actually as the next speaker Mr. Carlos what approaches would be more efficient in capacity building and ecosystem development and why? Good morning to everybody, I hope you are doing well. So when you asked me this question I agree with my colleague in his approach to capacity building. I think one of the most efficient approaches when you plan capacity building program is that they have to be integrative because normally there is sort of fallacy thing about capacity building we just think about training and training normally for a specific target group when capacity building strategy should be broader than that. And as Wasila mentioned also you have different levels you have the institutional and legal framework development you have the organizational development in a country also bringing together private and public stakeholders and you have the human resource development. So when you develop a strategy it has to be holistic. You cannot only approach one target group without forgetting others because what happens later is that if you for example provide entrepreneurial skills to future graduates but they don't have the enablers and the right environment to be successful they will fail. So you need to train officials government bodies you need to train at different levels and to provide this capacity building. So it's very important to have this vertical and horizontal integration plans in the ecosystem along with the capacity building that is one of the effective approaches and the second one you also I think Walid also mentioned about sustainability capacity building is not about capacity building for today it's about the ability of the actors in an ecosystem to deliver its mission not only for today but for tomorrow. So we need to look at capacity building in this sense as an investment not like a charity but it's an investment in the effectiveness and future sustainability of the ecosystem. Here I would say capacity building also as strategy for continuous improvement strategy towards the creation of this sustainable and effective system. So if you don't do proper analysis for example when you are setting this capacity building strategy and you don't look at what are the barriers for sustaining the ecosystem that could be policy barrier so you have socioeconomic barriers war in certain countries could be economic and financial could be ICT driven in terms of affordability infrastructure could be purely human capital barriers if you don't look at these barriers you cannot set a targeted capacity building so I think with these two main elements you could have a more efficient capacity building in ecosystem development I think. Excellent so you touched upon many important points basically building a whole ecosystem for capacity building or a national or a strategy that tackles all the angles for capacity building so which takes me to my next question to Mr. Hasan what kind of partnerships would be required to build such an ecosystem for capacity building? Hello Karim, hello for all of you. I think as innovation is a complex process and it needs all the shoot to interact with each other there is our main partnership that can make the ecosystem centric like academia entrepreneur network financial support public sector and private sector government all of this must interact together to build policy flexible make the innovation the centric of this policy because as the policy is flexible it can accelerate innovation and start up and make it through the future we need for capacity building to draw our future to get the output understand good analysis for the input we can must be practical not dependent university make don't interact with the market so graduate can't get a chance and vice versa and I think it's much developing country must follow developed country in what they achieved and ITU is play good role in how to reduce the divide between developed country and developing country so thank you thank you for that you touched upon a variety of stakeholders required to build those partnerships on the global region and national relevance which bring to Ms. Lama so throughout the past four speakers they touched upon many new approaches from your experience what is the importance of adopting capacity building from your views let's talk about the future and how the future of capacity building requires those new approaches hello Karim hello everyone good morning I think everything that you said makes perfect sense to me in my thinking when I was thinking of the future of capacity building all of these things came to mind and I was thinking of the importance and the first thing that came to my mind was competitiveness so I think the importance of capacity building or redefining capacity building approaches lies in the competitiveness and staying competitive as Arab ecosystems so how are we ensuring that our entrepreneurs can actually compete with fellow entrepreneurs who are present in more mature digital ecosystems and tech ecosystems how can we ensure that we are providing them with all the skills and all the competencies and even the mindset that they need not only to create businesses that are based in their own markets but create businesses that are scalable and that are competitive in bigger and mature markets and this really touches on a point that everyone mentioned which is the sustainability of the ecosystem and I think this is critical and that's why I would like to focus on the youth pipeline in my discussion today so I think having said all of that there's been a lot of investment that have been put in the Arab regions ecosystem so we've invested money and expertise for the last 15 years and I think we've done really good progress towards better capacitating our youth however I still think that we're still lagging behind and there are still a lot of things that can be done and I think that the core and the key reason why we are still lagging behind is related to the fact that we learn about entrepreneurship, we learn about innovation and digital technologies late in the process of our education journey that we go through so we either learn about it in university and sometimes not even at university we learn about those beyond university because at the university level these activities still remain ad hoc or extra curricular and I think this puts a huge dent on the pipeline of potential entrepreneurs that we can create I think it's common knowledge when we think of entrepreneurship we always say 90% of startup ideas fail only 10% of startup ideas succeed and only 1% of that 10% actually become successful businesses so with that we think of the masses we need to ensure that we are capacitating people at a really really early stage and when I talk about capacity building it's not only about skills and competencies, it's about awareness of the importance of entrepreneurship but also the mindset, the entrepreneurial mindset that they need so I think it's critical for our sustainability so leaving you with that I will say one last thing in terms of the future so we live in a different world today as we all know, we live in a world that is different than what it was 10 years ago or even 5 years ago the world is changing at an exponential pace and we are putting more and more emphasis on technology in our day to day life so use of today are born digitally literate so the way that we are communicating to them the way that we are working to capacitate them needs to be redefined they communicate, they learn and they interact in a way that is more dynamic and more open and more playful so how are we being user centric in our approaches speaking to how they learn so how are we teaching, what are we teaching and where are we teaching is critical and thinking of how learners are learning and where are they learning I think knowledge is more accessible and more attainable than any time before so are we really bringing what kind of new value are we bringing through our programs that entrepreneurs or youth in general cannot find with a click of a button you can find a how to tutorial you can think of today with just a click of a button so what new value can we bring that is beyond the general knowledge that they can actually attain by themselves so that's it thank you for the opportunity that you gave me to talk about that our pleasure in fact quite insightful actually that last point not to make myself seem a little bit old but I can relate to what you are saying with my children so specifically I mean I heard someone say that children of today have access to more knowledge at their fingertips than any time in history and so even the way they are thinking is quite different than the way any of us are thinking I think which maybe brings me to the next question relevant to Hassan what are the challenges to adopting these new paradigms and approaches to capacity building these are closures sorry you are muted I think ok I think I need to start with putting it together I think this is the challenge in our development country putting all the ecosystem together and they interact together they understand each other they can talk the same language they can know what the challenge for it and how can to overcome this what is the priority how to mix the ability together how to design this curriculum that feed each other together if intervener said that I need for the market 1, 2, 3 the government I need from private sector to do what 1, 2, 3 and we can learning as a team if we working as a team we will go fast and make this sustainability and we will take feedback to what we make the problem that we set the rule and when we try to practice it we have mainly challenge and can stop and each one can do what they need what the other need so one of the most is putting it together working together put the various together how to understand the vision what is the strategy to do that I think if we make this we will go through this process and will be sustainable so the practical good practical is best what we make not theoretical maybe theoretical is come after interact with ecosystem the result of this interact make a curriculum and practical it and graduate it and the feedback control feedback continuous process sustainable excellent thank you thank you very much for that so you talk sorry my connectivity is flickering a little bit so what I call from your intervention was basically that we should try to bring all the stakeholders and all the components of the ecosystem together what I understood correctly is actually critical yes and the the user is the center is the center of this user and the ecosystem be the center not bridge cannot any each other the output who is the center so we will try to make our objective and enhance it to be better the objective must be measurable so we can maybe agree we will be meeting each month or like that but working together is one of the the objective that we can excellent so on that note I want to maybe ask Lama so working together and trying to bring the whole ecosystem and all the partners together what about people how can this fit with trying to bridge this and divide particularly for those who are on the receiving and of all this of all these ecosystems please the floor is yours thank you Katie actually in my earlier intervention I talked about the importance of the pipeline and the importance of youth and I described youth as born digitally literate and I call them digital natives but is that true I mean across the world specifically in underdeveloped and developing countries are youth being born digitally literate are they actually digitally native of course not of course they're not digital and digital inequality is a huge challenge for youth but it's also a huge challenge to past building organizations who are rethinking their approaches towards their work how can they ensure that what they're doing is inclusive and leaves no one behind and this goes back to what Hassan was talking about and I think Carlos as well in terms of the complementarity and the importance of the complementarity so instead of doing things doing the same thing you know we have multiple organizations who are doing the same thing we should be rethinking how can we complement each other but when I say that when I think of digital divides so why do these digital divides exist especially in the Arab region and especially in developing countries so access to the internet so infrastructurally there's a problem so who's working on that affordability of the internet so even if there is access to the internet are people able to afford paying for that and thirdly it's the access to the digital skills that they need so even if they have internet access and they can afford the internet access are they able to use the digital technologies and this poses a huge question for us when we think of redefining our strategy and our approaches to capacity development but it also poses the question of what type of partnerships can we broker between the government and the private sector in order to ensure that we are doing whatever we can do to break these digital divides so we have a key opportunity today before we used to reach the people that we could reach without the use of technology today we can reach whoever we want and our impact can reach whoever we want due to if we maximize on the use of technology so there's an important role to play between the private sector and the public sector so having private public partnerships to ensure that the private sector is able to provide the expertise and the experience but the governments need to lead that because their objective is to grow their individuals, grow their knowledge economy in order to grow their economy so what can they do together in order to complement each other to ensure that we leave no one behind I think this is the direction for us leave no one behind when we're thinking of our capacity building approaches actually I think you hit the issue on the nail IT statistics mainly highlight that I think around 52 or 53% of the people in the Arab region are online the remaining percentage obviously are not online mainly for economic and social factors the ones that you highlighted issues particularly to affordability digital skills even illiteracy and so I think you're spot on on this topic which actually I want to ask maybe Carlos from your perspective what other challenges do you foresee in capacity development and particularly on the training courses in the Arab region I mean so some of the other speakers mentioned some but interested to hear your perspective as well there are many challenges indeed I think one of the first one is to understand Arab region as one I think Walid mentioned before I don't think there is just one Arab region you can cluster countries according to the ICT development so instead of having like one size fits all strategy also as Walid mentioned you need tailor made strategies in capacity building so to create that that's already a third challenge you see that the level of for example countries like Qatar Arab Emirates is totally different to the needs and situational context of countries like Yemen or Sudan so the training needs and capacity strategies should be totally different sometimes also one of the challenges that we try now also because we are in this digital transformation paradigm everything needs to be digital but we observe for example one startup that is very popular in Sana'a in Yemen I mentioned this one is called Wakbat they created a digital app it's kind of over it so they distribute food from restaurants to households especially during the war and what happened that only 5% of owners of restaurants they use like smartphones so they have to come up with different solutions the solution that could be applicable in a country maybe like Egypt or I don't know Saudi Arabia it will not work there because people are not digital driven and they don't have the facilities so at the end the solution without cutting or failing the startup what they did is to asset and to use cable line and normal fixed line phone calls and asset demands so even during war they will never they never stop their business they continue because they found solutions to their local circumstances if you use one solution that works in one country might not work in another one but there is one of the challenges is to create also the trainings in function of the local needs and it has to be tailor made and customized to its country also I think another of the biggest challenge is that you mentioned Arab region and I miss like we have in Europe this regional approach so you have a lot of silos and maybe there is a bit more integration of startups and the innovation ecosystem between Gulf countries maybe because you have also this Gulf cooperation council that they facilitate the trade and facilitate the free trade zone between them but in other countries there's no like a glue that merge all these ecosystem across countries sometimes because of political differences like Algeria and Morocco for example because of war tone situations like in Libya Sudan or Yemen as I mentioned before so I think that is also a challenge how to create regional structure that they can scale up countries that they are at the bottom of the base land I think that is one of the biggest challenges and I think another a third challenge but also depends on the environmental context is the culture I think especially I'm glad that Laman, Wasila are here because there's also females and female population are very important drivers in the entrepreneurial ecosystem for example many people would be surprised to hear that in Saudi Arabia many of the entrepreneurs are female so we have also some kind of of this esterotides but if you map education level is very high in Saudi Arabia and female population many female graduates they create their own startups I think culture is also like a challenge in a barrier that could hinder the boosting of innovation ecosystem in that region that's I mean you mentioned very important points particularly I want to touch maybe on one point regarding the regional approach that you mentioned and the silent approach the silent issue yesterday I think in the partnership session there was a sort of a debate but there were some discussions around market fragmentation in the Arab region where a startup in order for it to expand it has to open branches in different countries to access different resources I think including capacity building resources as well and certainly this issue of market fragmentation is certain is relevant what you were saying about the silent approach there needs to be I think a general and regional ecosystem that facilitates capacity building access and resources to all entrepreneurs across the region certainly this would benefit the region of charge but also on the gender divide like you mentioned this is quite important as well this is a big issue as well in the Arab region although I think it might be improving in the recent years but certainly still an issue and fortunately our next speaker is a female Mr. Wasila I would like to ask you what is the role of academia and other partners in capacity building in Algeria please Yes, thank you of course academia is one of the main actors at the section of research education and innovation which means that higher education is at the the heart of the capacity building process a major source of new knowledge and an important agent of its transmission Algeria has in phase the importance of education and higher education to support its development projects with more than 106 academic institutions including universities centers higher education schools and institutes and institutes and so on and very recently a higher school of artificial intelligence this evolution is the result of the policy of democratization and the free access to higher education and of its consecrated mission of public service both in terms of development and of new infrastructures and in terms of increasing the number of students through development strategy and also with the reform of the architectures of Algerian higher education accompanied by an sorry, updating and upgrading of the various educational programs as well as the reorganization of educational management and governments. Thank you Excellent. Thank you very much for that. Can I ask as well Mr. Walid what kind of tools are needed for us to building and building those ecosystems? Yeah, sure definitely we need innovative tools so that we can start working on this capacity building program so basically we need to build digital platforms to act as knowledge base we need education management systems, we need to make sure that we have a digital innovation lab also as well in place so this will all facilitate the collaboration and training and capacity building initiatives most importantly we need to make sure that these tools digital tools are having accessibility protocols so we keep our inclusion for people with disabilities and we need to make sure that we encourage like Mr. Carlos touch on women we need to encourage girls and women to access these tools most also importantly we need digital sandboxes to test what we have learned and to have hand on experience applying what this training and what the theoretical side on this sandboxes or test beds before we move to apply it in the real world problems or applied in our innovation ecosystem development so all these tools will help the training and capacity building and we need to make sure that also these tools are accessible from lowest speed connection like the speakers tackle this kind of connection problems or infrastructure problems so we need to make sure all these tools are accessible from lower speed connection maybe countries or so that we make sure that we left no one behind excellent thank you very much for that I can see the audience in the swap already starting to ask questions we will handle them after the next round the distinguished panelists but I want to really ask Mr. Devin Clark who asked how do you see the integration of a staffing pipeline for entrepreneurs into the ecosystem perhaps can you clarify the question further I don't think it's entirely clear what do you mean by staffing pipeline specifically so look forward to receiving your clarified question and then again we received other questions as well in the chat we will tackle them which I think links to the previous answers that Mr. Waleed mentioned regarding the tools so specifically Lama how can we accelerate capacity building and ecosystem development in the Arab region what would you recommend for the Arab regions or maybe perhaps you want to make recommendations to specific stakeholders it's funny I had a couple of points in my head and then everyone spoke and we know how many challenges there are and so many challenges have been mentioned that doesn't end but it's healthy I think it's always healthy to think of how we can move forward but there are things I'm going to mention for and then I will note on some of the things that my fellow panelists mentioned so first on the policy level and not on creating new education policies it's more on how can we implement on these policies we've been having discussions around integrating ICT into curriculums in schools and universities and in the core for years as long as I remember and still something that we haven't done and I think this is part of how our governments and the public sector is looking at their transformational visions so the recommendation here is we need to as the international community really should endorse and support people who are within government who are leading efforts on innovation, entrepreneurship and on future of education we should endorse them and support them or else policies will stay policies that are not executable that's the first. The second is related to the type of content that we provide so our capacity building approaches I think we should do less of classroom approach, master classes knowledge that is available and attainable to youth easily through a click of a button and focus more on activities and approaches that are more interactive that are more experiential looking at knowledge transfer activities at twinning programs, learning by doing things that cannot be done unless you provide the network for the entrepreneurs or for the youth, you provide the environment for them to be able to to learn and this tackles a bit on Carlos's point in relation to in relation to the clustering and the complementation I've always thought of the idea of incubators and incubator for incubators I think there is a need to because of that need for complementarity who is capacitating those who are capacitating youth and I think it's critical because we do different things and we have different levels of expertise because we've had different experiences as capacity building organizations so how can we share that, how can we share those experiences so we can capacitate those who are capacitating. The third thing is about the educators which is important we're always looking at the learner but there's a need to look at how we are capacitating educators and teachers but also how we're recruiting them and ensuring that they are equipped with with the skills of the future, things that they need not only on also not only on competencies but also in the mindset so how can we ensure that we are recruiting people in the right mindset for the future but also we're equipping them with the skills that they need and lastly on the digital device so this is an infrastructural issue also very very important so to be able to break some of these digital divides there's a lot of investment that needs to be put for access to the internet and its affordability to ensure that we leave no one behind but also on the infrastructural and I think infrastructure is really so I'm not talking about internet infrastructure infrastructural in terms of building ecosystems so partnerships between the private sector and the public sector so we can think of this holistic approach engaging everyone and seeing where can everyone actually contribute to the growth of our ecosystems so those would be my four recommendations and the final one that is inspired by Carlos actually is related to the contextualization and the tailoring of our support this is, you know, we talk about innovation it's all about user centricity so let's do that, let's tailor let's customize, we cannot take off the shelf capacity building programs and roll them out in different countries there are contexts, there are cultures now we need to take into account that's it, thank you Thank you very much, that's a full recipe of recommendations that I think I hope all stakeholders find them beneficial so maybe Carlos, since Lama mentioned you and all, do you have additional recommendations? Well, thank you Lama for mentioning me I would say so as I mentioned at the beginning first of all to develop coherent and integrative responses to innovation whether they are ICT driven or not in line with the global regional governments and national circumstances what happens sometimes, for example I would mention the case of Tunisia when they passed to design the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals is that they created kind of capacity building program but they didn't have or there was a lack of monitoring an evaluation of the programs there was a lack of governance and there was a lack of a stable source of funding so without those elements you cannot have a sustainable ecosystem and sustainable capacity building program what I observe also because I'm like 20 years in capacity building projects is that many of them when the source of funding is finished the project initiative is also finished so you really need to look for sustainability of these projects and programs and also thinking about the future so you need to mobilize additional findings and technology and accelerate capacity building and now for example I mentioned before sustainable development goals so for example a thematic or important relevant thematic issue for even startups and entrepreneurs are related to climate change to achieve the sustainable development goals so this should be kind of priority also in the region drawing on public and public sources for example thinking on the near future at different levels for example in the Gulf countries that they are more advanced and more developed entrepreneurs that should have training on ESG what is environment social and governance factors for sustainability and how their initiatives and startups could be aligned to achieve certain of the goals because also maybe at global level in the near future at least at EU level that's the case that even for getting loads for getting venture capital now you have to fulfill certain environmental criteria it's not only about profit it's not only about growth but it's about sustainable development so I think this is some of the recommendations for future capacity building programs thank you very much Walid do you have additional recommendations that you would like to propose yeah well so actually this innovation ecosystem is our weapon to face future pandemics future natural disasters so we don't have much time and we learned a lot from the corona pandemic and now my personal recommendation that we should have two and long-term plan, short-term plan that we should utilize what currently ITU is providing through ITU Academy and we should immediately start utilizing this kind of capacity building programs and training and for the long-term plan actually we should focus on the academia partnership and we have thousands of thousands of students in many levels bachelor's degree, master's degree, PhD degree that they are in continuous search for good research topics so we can direct them to do more research on the ecosystem building ecosystem development and innovation in general so by this long-term plan we will have a lot of research papers research projects in innovation and innovation ecosystem development and those students after they joined the workforce themselves will become ambassadors for the innovation ecosystem and they will support because they spend sometimes doing research and they actually got their degrees doing research in this area so they will become ambassadors for this innovation ecosystem and they will support it whenever and wherever they have opportunities so basically this is my recommendation Thank you very much and last and definitely what would be your recommendations? Yes of course I don't want to repeat what my colleague already said but the Arabic status need to include capacity building as part of mainstream approach in all ecosystem development programs and the good process it's structured around the five steps the first one is engage stockholders in capacity development this engagement should be sustained during the entire process and the second point is to assess existing capacities and the gaps to be filled and the third point is to design capacity development strategy and of course after that to implement this strategy of capacity building and the last one is to evaluate the result of capacity development of the strategy we implement we have also to consider that there are generally some of aspects that have to that have a strong influence on capacity development like the institutional mechanisms they provide the overall framework for development planning and decision making and include in policy legal regulatory strategy and organizational framework and process we have also the responsibility which refers to the hierarchical linkages between institutions and the relationship between the public and private organization and those on whom their actions have an impact the third point is the leadership refers to the capacity of organizations and individuals to foster change to also inspire action and mobilize stockholders the fourth one and the last is the knowledge and information this is essentially and very important to ensure that decision making and capacity development initiatives are based on solid scientific and technical data and just to to end with the last point that's I want to add also that moving from a project-based approach to programmatic or holistic approach is necessary as the progressive and the long-term features of capacity building makes very difficult makes it difficult to carry out development support monitoring and evaluate evaluation task with additional project a traditional project based model there is a growing evidence that a holistic approach based on the long-term investment working better and as a model for supporting capacity development thank you thank you very much so we roughly have around five more minutes left for the session we have a number of questions from the audience and I do want to give the opportunity as well for takeaways from your end so what I suggest that we do I will read out all the questions that we received and then I'll hand the floor to each of you one by one to give your takeaways and see if there are any of the questions that you would like to answer in your short intervention so roughly we'll have around one minute each to answer the questions and make your takeaways so quickly we have a question from Mr. Reali Abassan who said what could be the relationship between innovation, entrepreneurship and regulatory famous developing countries and then we have another question from Ali saying what is the impact and this is directed I think to Asila what is the impact of higher education strategy in Algeria on entrepreneurs performance and fitting to market demand and what is the role of public sector incubators for achieving employability and SME creation Devin Clark kindly clarified his question he said indeed the creation of entrepreneurs naturally would include the creation of jobs and hence the need for qualified staff for the entrepreneurs and their businesses should this pipeline be integrated into the ecosystem creating a fund for good fit staffing towards entrepreneurs could prove incredibly beneficial for the sustainability of businesses to provide best fit I hope I am clear you are Devin if it's not applicable to the discussion then please excuse the question totally I think it's clear Carlos you wanted to answer I think one of the questions by Ali Abbasan so I'll give you the floor first thank you in relation to the first one relationship between regulatory framework, innovation and entrepreneurship if you use for example the ITU ecosystem assessment canvas you can consider the regulatory framework as an enabler then you have innovation which is a process and entrepreneurship could be an outcome what is clear is that there are a lot of studies that demonstrate that when you have limited and restrictive regulatory framework this will impact negatively in the capacity of entrepreneurs and without entrepreneurs you cannot foster the innovation ecosystem in a country or in a region I think there will be a clear link between the three elements excellent thank you very much Wasila would you like to give your concluding remarks and maybe answer the question directed to Wasila can you hear us or is it is the connectivity flickering on my end or your well I see okay let me go to maybe our next speaker Hassan do you want to give your concluding remarks please yes I think if we if we make together a vision and how to reach to this vision by ecosystem side what the future they want to ecosystem will be what is the strength and the strength and the challenge they face what is the gap between the future and the desire and what is the difficulty for each other which point we can start with we can take good practical as recommendation for another experiment also we can build the recommendation on the guideline to guide the how can the ecosystem work and we review this guideline frequently to have sustainable development and innovation subsystem that's all thank you very much so going back to Wasila would you like to maybe give your concluding remarks in 10 15 seconds Wasila can you hear us hello yes yes I hear you now but I think that I have some problem with my connection can you repeat the question no I was asking if you can give your concluding remarks ah thank you yes I think ok so thank you very much for inviting me in your webinar and for the all participant it was very interesting webinar and we had a lot of very interesting information and I think that this subject is very important in our country so I think it's we have to focus on so that's what we try to do here in Algeria thank you excellent thank you very much there was a question directed to you on Swabkar Wasila I suggest perhaps if you want to interact with the question on Swabkar by chat and perhaps you can try to answer and then Walid your concluding remarks please yes definitely actually we shouldn't be afraid of diagnosing our ecosystems and we should start immediately identified our needs identified to identify what is capacity building programs and we shouldn't be afraid to ask other for help so a partnership through partnerships through collaboration with international organizations like IPU or developed country so we should start immediately in building our capacity and in providing training in this ecosystem development area excellent thank you very much and last and definitely not least Lama the floor is yours thank you again I think from the questions and from everything that's been discussed one thing I would like to ask is the mindset the mindset the mindset because you know we're talking about market demands market supply we still see students going into doing the traditional jobs that we are raised to become there's different opportunities there are different things that you can do but we don't have the data so how how are we changing that mindset and that happens early early early on in our education to ensure that the market supply is actually fitting the market demand for the future of failure so I don't believe I don't understand how we didn't talk about failure in this panel I don't believe how we didn't talk about it but this is at the core of it we need to promote failure and because this is where we start in changing the mindsets of the youth and this is where we start in changing a bit the trajectory of how we're heading in terms of the future of jobs the future of education the future of markets so thank you so much it was a pleasure to meet all of you thank you very much Lama I just wanted to add one thing to Lama just following her threat is that it's very important to create not entrepreneurs by circumstances but entrepreneurs by choice so that they have the environment exactly a very very good point Carlos so I want to end by thanking all the distinguished speakers I hope that you all interact with the rest of the forum with the BSFAR swap card our next session is an interesting one that will outline journeys of entrepreneurs so I would like to hand it over to the next session thank you very much thank you bye no no speaking but hello welcome to the to the panel we will start in a moment yeah any can everyone hear can I do a sound check just to make sure everyone can hear each other I think that will be good can you see me I hope everybody can see me because I think in the previous set there was some I couldn't hear a lot of the speakers so there was so I can help with the sound check and the camera check until Khadija and the rest of the speakers join welcome on board everyone so Moafa Fatma and Ahmed I can see you and hear you clearly so all is fine I think Haifa as well we can see you as well Khadija the floor is yours please you're muted hello everyone can we start yes please go ahead well I have the honor to moderate the final session of the regional innovation forum for the Arab states we want to invite you to embark on an innovation journey and to hear stories from the frontlines within our Arab countries we're going to hear today from innovators and entrepreneurs about their experiences their challenges but also the solutions they're currently working on because there's so many of them I believe this is a privilege to actually hear from them for all of you who are actually joining in please do submit your questions via swap card because we're going to have I think a 5 to 10 minutes round of questions but before we reach there we actually want to introduce you to our panelists today we're having we respected gender parity just for you to know if there are any feminists out there so we're having two women and two men joining us Dr. Moafa an associate professor at the Hamad bin Khalifa and a winner of the ITU AI for Development Challenge Haifa is a social entrepreneur and a development champion who's as well and we're lucky to have her as a UN liaison officer at the ITU regional office Fatima who's the founder of Access AI and AI for Development Challenge as well as another doctor this one is a different doctor Ahmed who's the co-founder and medical director of Masboud for technology and big data command for health challenge winner the three rounds of questions are going to go over experience challenges but also the kind of problems you as researchers and entrepreneurs are solving you have around three minutes each to answer the question and what would be interesting is for you to answer back to each other just so that we can tell a beautiful story to our audience in here and I'll start with Dr. Moafa as an academic how do you reach the gap between research and entrepreneurship considering that there is indeed a gap between research and entrepreneurship in the Arab world Thank you very much everyone thank you for including me in this important forum to discuss and exchange ideas the speakers in the previous sessions have been really excellent especially the talking about failure and what that means and finding that anyway that's another you need a culture of accepting failure that's very very important and the gap talking about research and entrepreneurship I'm an academic, I'm a researcher I work within these academic institutions so my perspective would be different than a student or somebody as a full time entrepreneur and if you understand academia I remember when I graduated my PhD I asked my professor give me a hint, what should I do it was Moafa publish or perish alright and then I start moving let's publish publish publish and then sometime I was in Saudi Arabia at the time this concept we can't just publish we need to take our ideas and be innovative and take these ideas into products and there's a very strong movement within the region and within GCC specifically to move away from the natural resources in terms of creative knowledge economy so there was a big push on that and I started entering this innovation entrepreneurship and as academic even my colleagues Moafa why wasting your time with this stuff the bread and butter is published or perish and if you get involved in innovation entrepreneurship you're not going to be evaluated and see who's going to waste your time and so forth so that was the culture of academia in general but as we move forward and there's a push for incubation taking these ideas and getting research grants and part of the research grants is you have to have some kind of technology commercial ready where will you be by the time the research is complete this has put pressure as well on academician because I've never been trained to be an innovator or entrepreneur I've been trained to publish research work and now I was in the college of public health and now I'm in the College of Science and Engineering this is a strong push and I remember Ardeen and Moafa research is important but I want to see something tangible and that means the College of Science and Engineering is a tool of shift because we develop, we make products and so forth and that was you know pushed me to do the emotion sensing recognition application which we received which was unique so now we move from academia from this publisher parish to demo or die like you need to create this kind of demonstration demo or die and now the next movement is deploy or die you need to deploy not just demo it and show it idea how do you deploy it how do you market it no I was involved in a startup it's time consuming it's a full-time job how can I how can I do that as an academic work teach and do my research and at the same time be involved in innovation entrepreneurship I can't do it it's really important I have to choose I can't have you know almost like two masters I can't have my feet in both places and I really believe now from deploy or die it's going to be like succeed or die you know make a product instead of grants instead of actually having research grants we want products and we want these to create revenue and if you can't do that well what's the point but this works in STEM science technology in the STEM world but what happens to liberal arts or Islamic studies or and that's where I feel you know a college of science and engineering we need to you know we're very good at building but we're not maybe good at setting the human elements of things and that's where we need to combine or create a collaborative between our you know in the liberal arts and and try to use our techniques and also to solve their problems and I think if we create that kind of ecosystem and there's a way of doing that and and you know creating these creating an atmosphere and environment hey you know what if you have a good idea you can take a year off and we'll give you some industry partnerships and funding to get it there but I think the university is hesitant in like really pushing that so they're testing waters we're in the here in Qatar especially are you know we're in the demo or dye deploy or dye kind of framework but how do we move that and like actually hey let's have a real life actual product that it's actually in the community that you can as a full-time entrepreneur or with some partners to help you and train you or the three minutes I love the transition so actually Dr. Moafa we're going to ask Fatemeh what it actually feels like being in that demo or dye deploy or dye kind of world Fatemeh what does it feel like being an innovator in the Arab world I think actually I think I'm going to start with the concept of failure because we've already touched upon it and I feel like as an entrepreneur it's inevitable right and I feel like innovative in general it's trying an innovator it's like trying to strike a fine balance between overcoming the many challenges and hurdles that as an entrepreneur you're inevitably going to face whilst also at the same time making sure you're taking advantage of the opportunities available in your ecosystem and I think that when we talk about this culture of innovation and the ecosystem in general we're kind of fundamentally talking about one and the same thing and if you look at the textbook definition of what it means to innovate or innovate or innovation in general what we're talking about is bringing new ideas to the market new methods different ways of thinking new or different forms of change and I think that when as an entrepreneur you're bringing these new ideas to the market you're going to need a support system right you're going to need an enabling environment and that enabling environment has to consist of important stakeholders like policymakers, financiers researchers, academics and that environment I mean for us we didn't have it I mean being an innovator in general I think when we talk about it in other ecosystems for them the kind of sort of building upon something that's already there right it means like improving upon something that's already there for you but for us we didn't have that so we started from a ground zero so I would say it was incredibly challenging and I think being an innovator in our ecosystem was difficult because not only did we have not only did we not have the support that we needed but we also didn't have the luxury of time and by that I mean we didn't really start or we didn't think we're going to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch we sort of said okay what is the concept that sort of is working but we can put a spin on it and we took micro work and we said you know what we are going to provide jobs in Somalia and Somalia and we took that and we applied it to our ecosystem and I think that for us is something that is working and for us not trying to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch is what worked for ourselves so it was hard in general on the general note but bouncing off the experience of Fatima how has your experience potentially been either similar or different and perhaps could you go on to the areas of ease and not only the challenges but perhaps things that were a bit more easy in the Arab world what has been the easiest and the hardest Dr. Ahmad Well I have started medicine in Egypt then I graduated in 2013 it was the start of the movement of entrepreneurship to spread in Egypt and then I started to be like I want to be an entrepreneur so that was completely different from being a medical doctor because there are many different points between medical practice which is completely regulated you should do everything in evidence you should use the evidence in every single action you do and being an entrepreneur which you should disrupt actually the rules and you should innovate something in you that's not happening so then I started to be an entrepreneur in healthcare and mixing between both worlds which was challenging the first thing I should have done which is research and development starting from the evidence starting from the medical evidence the public health factors which helps the problems do we face in Egypt what should we do to fix them by innovation and if there are any other relevant innovations in other parts of the world and then started to focus on chronic disease as the problem to try to innovate or try to fix by innovation and entrepreneurship it was in 2018 when we established the company legally incorporation and then the entrepreneurship system in Egypt was much more mature than when I graduated and also so I have noticed the difference I just started to be interested in entrepreneurship and when I really founded my startup so it's a very challenging journey especially in a well regulated industry like the healthcare so it's also being evidence based or trying to be evidence based in every step you do in the product development because it actually deals with human beings and deals with the most ambitious job which is the health so that was adding the challenge to me as an entrepreneur along with the other traditional challenges that any entrepreneur can face in the ecosystem Thank you Ahmed since you're actually wearing two hats many of you are wearing two hats just like Haifa who's with us here Haifa is both a social entrepreneur and an innovator many of us actually in the Arab world juggle different hats but what would be interesting is to understand and to know perhaps and to hear from what it actually feels wearing these two hats in our ecosystem Haifa Thank you Hadija Oh it feels fantastic and the question to the audience there is try to figure out whether that was sarcastic or not I think the way I like to think about it is that well I am primarily an innovator and that's the definition that Fatima had had given so for me an innovator is someone who has the mindset of innovation being someone who is who thrills and thrives on challenges really wants to solve a problem that is somewhere there in society in the case of social innovation it is someone who cares about societal problems hence the world social and the third thing is someone who disposes of certain tools that would help him solve those problems in the way I like to see it is that there are different spheres or spaces for innovation those being for instance the talent space where we find tools like storytelling or positive deviance, reverse mentoring the intelligence space there we are talking more about research such as Dr. Moafak has said we are talking about behavioral knowledge and insights we are talking about critical thinking solution space and the tech space, the technology space so for the technology space that is where probably Fatima and Dr. Ahmad are operating we are talking about VR, AI etc but then comes the solution space and that is where social entrepreneurship is so for me I am not wearing two hats I am holding an umbrella and underneath that umbrella I am wearing a hat so the big umbrella is innovation in general I have some sort of interdisciplinary curiosity that allows me to look at the same challenge from different perspectives and then if that challenge really needs to be a social enterprise that is where I put my social entrepreneurship hat and think about ways to make that little innovation survive financially survive social entrepreneurship being one of the tools of the methods the mediums that would allow me to do so we are actually all the way to the second round of questions and actually the reason I am catching you off right here is because we are going to start up with you so you are also you are also working for the ITU and I wanted to know in all of the challenges that you have faced how has the ITU helped or an organization like the ITU helped or how could it help thank you so I presume by help we mean the positive impact of intergovernmental organizations because those can have positive or negative impact depending on how they operate on the ground I would say well in my case personally in the case of Tunisia intergovernmental organizations can really help when it gets to positive lobbying and infrastructure what we have noticed recently at least during the COVID crisis is that Tunisia again that is the context we are talking about the government is really capable to operate or to digitize its different services really quickly and so it is not really a matter of capacity building as it is a matter of shifting the culture from a crisis response to really adopting different methodologies different mindset and deploying that infrastructure that would eventually help entrepreneurs thrive in their ecosystems one of the major challenges that we face for instance is the fact that what takes us let's say two weeks to do if the entire process what digitize takes us two years sometimes for it to happen and that cannot only change with social entrepreneurs in general but it really needs the weight of intergovernmental organizations including the ITU for example so you've mentioned infrastructure as well as lobbying as two of the challenges that kind of the ITU is now trying to solve we know also that many has always been a problem and finding problem has always been a problem Ahmed what financial resources have you been able to find for Masboud knowing that medical engineering and all of the innovations in medicines are multi-billion markets and if you ever found funding what role have investors played in helping you create impact in your community well regarding fundraising social or impact driven startup we were able to collect funds as grants from like the competition that we have wanted the ITU was one of the organizers and also other grants from other like companies or UN organizations but the challenge that we faced in fundraising was really about the investors to have the investors who have the mindset to invest in the driven startups so in our ecosystem in the Arab world I can say not just in Egypt investors are more oriented to startups that can have growth potential traditionally more like marketplaces like e-commerce or other things that have been actually startups have been there actually so they know well the KPIs that they can measure their return on investment on it but for disruptive innovations I can say that we have faced challenges in convincing investors to invest in such innovative or disruptive innovations we have luckily also we have investors on board which is back-accelerated to Egypt so at the level of accelerator at that level of seed stage or brie seed stage there are a lot of ready to invest a lot of investors ready to invest the accelerators number in Egypt is being increased but for real investors to invest in later stages there is a gap between the brie seed and series B and later stages so there is an actual gap in this stage I'd be curious to know Fatemeh if in Somaliland you also had similar challenges in terms of funding and also hear a little bit on how you try to solve it absolutely I think for us the number one challenge we had was funding or lack of capital or actually I don't think it was a lack of capital I think it was access to early stage funding and that was what we were missing at the beginning and for us I think a lot of research or traditional financial institutions regarded us as the high risk investment and the reason for that was okay so you are a 26 year old woman without a solid tech background and you want to build a business in a sub Saharan Africa and your business has a social mission and only a social mission and you only want to hire people from low income backgrounds they were like just stay there yeah I think I need to find where I'm actually wanted and that's what we did we went where we were wanted so we sort of pivoted I think that was the key word anyway 2020 we pivoted we pivoted our organisation and we went to like we went to government institutions and things like that and funding in that way so we started looking for grants and that is actually what gave us a kick start to our business and now we're actually on track to becoming self-sustaining and generating revenue through the services that we actually provide so I think in general the main thing that or the thing that we could have improved was education it really comes down to education or a lack of education and removing the friction between in the funding process between entrepreneurs and investors so I think that's something that's important thank you Fatemeh since we were about to speak about education we'll go back to the world of academia Dr Moafa what is current I know that a lot of research that is produced right now in the Arab world does not specifically translate into at say tangible service innovation or product innovation and so what is the missing link that could help spur but also encourage more students and researchers to venture into entrepreneurship and create successful products Dr Moafa there we go I've always interested thank you very much very good question and I've always been interested in research you know academic research in the Arab world you know in the last couple weeks we have an access to this portal that analyzes all the research output in the Arab world so what I did is I was just curious out of curiosity link who are the knowledge producers who produces research output because in you know the part of the innovation generally you know you need ideas and ideas come from research and figuring out problems and developing them and you move from research and hopefully some of those ideas can be taken further into the demo deploy and become of some kind of viable product and what's interesting when you look at all the Arab world there's a high number of output in terms of research production production and across all categories and I looked at you know in the number one Egypt Saudi Arabia and it's interesting number three I'm talking like number three almost tied is Tunisia for number three and almost there you won't believe in the last three years something like really exceptional in the last three years only given the heartache what they've been going through one country has been going on at least third place now in terms of knowledge production across all categories from the arts to the medicine to technology computer science and it's Iraq Iraq has been I was very and I shared this on my LinkedIn which was very fascinating for me is that there's anyway there's a very large output of knowledge production and there is no I don't want to say ecosystem that takes these ideas and incubates them and makes them into products and that's why if you see I know this is the unfortunate part of this that's why you see a lot of for example this brain drain when we have the brain from the Arab world going to Europe or North America you have a lot of success stories because there's an ecosystem there is access to money which is Fatima said there's more that people said there's more room to fail and to learn and to move forward where we don't have that you fail once people can leave you as a failure and it's very hard for people to invest in you again so you know moving that that culture just from production which we have great scientists we have great minds we have great people doing great things in the most unbelievable circumstances like I'm saying in Iraq or other places or Fatima with all due respect to the work that you're doing it's fascinating right you have this great you have a fan Fatima you have a fan especially today at the end of the day and she said something very important she said you know what there's funds but getting access people don't care about social entrepreneurship no offense we want to do good in society by doing well financially people don't understand that we just care about the financial component and don't really care about the social component anyway we need to move this knowledge production to innovation to building an ecosystem that can help really and one person said I love this we need to incubate incubators not every incubator can actually take that idea they need an incubator for incubators to move that idea moving forward and really making a difference and I believe you know we have great minds I worked with you know some of the in the airport some great amazing beautiful minds that do and that really care about uplifting this whole you know this region and you know and you hear these great success stories and one other thing you know a lot of these success stories unfortunately or you know the kareem they're the world they're me to products they're not products that meaning that you know an uber and then we may always take that and make it a local virgin there's no other way around where I haven't seen any ideas where hey you know in Europe or North they're taking ideas here and actually know they're making their own me too it's always us looking at you know it's the other way around and we need to change that we need to you know I think we're going to move slowly to that direction, but for me seeing Iraq in the circumstances and what they've done in terms of their knowledge production and what they have done in the last three years really gave me a lot of hope that inshallah hopefully that we can really do something and it's going to take time. And you know Fatima's story or Ahmad, like especially Fatima and Somali, like this is amazing and it really is amazing what she's doing and what's happening. And you know, anyway, so keep up the good work. These are the stories that we need and she's going to start making money and she's going to with this social entrepreneurship, we need these stories, we need to showcase them. We need people like for the Inspire and Ahmad, you know, a medical doctor, you know, you're leaving medicine for this. Can I leave academia for entrepreneurship? Am I that brave? I don't know. It's really difficult to make that jump. So good for you. That's exactly the kind of stories we're going to give you right now, Dr. Muafa, Fatima. That's exactly the kind of stories that we're going to have here on display. Fatima, your goal right now is to, through Access AI, is to reduce poverty, a very much needed, I'd say, objective in the world, a bold one. So can you tell us how you're going about it? And maybe you would convince Dr. Muafa to join you and make that jump into entrepreneurship. We're trying to get Dr. Muafa as a client of ours, actually, and I need you to do it. So our mission, our value at Access AI, everything that we do is focused on providing work. And if you think about it, the world's most pressing problems come from the fact that there is a deep state of poverty. There are over a billion people right now who are living on less than a dollar or $2 a day. Almost a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. I think every year the fact, the statistic is 300,000 women die of childbirth, right? And the World Health Organization says that 99% of these deaths are due to poverty. And I think the traditional way of thinking has always been, oh, okay, let's build a hospital, let's build a school, let's build a well. And I think for us at Access AI, what we're really trying to do is move away from this, excuse me for saying so, but this paternalistic sort of aid and charity model and get the West to sort of value us as producers in the global economy rather than in recipes of handouts. And I think for us, we know that trickle down economics is not going to work in an ecosystem like Somalia or Somaliland. We cannot wait for that. What we need to do is directly inject capital into these poorer households and we know that when we do this, these people aren't going to go and squander their wealth. No, they're going to invest it back into the places that it needs to be. So healthcare, education, all of these things. And we know for a fact that 90% or women in general from lower income backgrounds invest 90% of their paycheck back into their households. And this will ultimately have a multiplier effect, hopefully reducing that poverty level. And I sort of kind of haven't highlighted what access I actually does. So we provide jobs to low income people, jobs to low income people through the digital economy and we connect them to digital work. So they do things like image tagging, video tagging and basic low entry tech jobs. So it's jobs and skills that everybody can do. And hopefully we want to reskill our workers for the new digital economy because everything is heading that way anyway. Put in the door basically. Yeah. To put in the door to further, yeah, more advanced tech skills and I suppose this is completely new to Somaliland. Absolutely. A lot of ages. I mean, data labeling is a new industry in itself. And I think it was the head of AI at Tesla who said that data labeling and data annotation is going to be just as important as data programming within the next 10, 20, 30 years. So I think. Thank you very much. That's actually going to check that myself. Ahmed, since Masboud is a health oriented tech startup, what are you exactly trying to solve right now in terms of, you know, we all were waiting, long waiting for that vaccine for COVID-19. So we'd like to know what kind of, what are your plans for solving some of the health problems that we have in the Arab world. And we want to know all of the secrets. Away from infectious diseases and COVID-19, we work on non-communicable diseases. There are 70 million chronic disease patients in the Arab world, which I mean by chronic diseases are diabetes, hypertension. And when we include obesity, the numbers are much higher. So this is the problem. Chromatic disease management is long term, the process which continues lifelong. And actually doctors are not with patients 24 seven and they are not, it's not their mission to coach the patients in their daily life and to teach them how to manage, self-manage their conditions. And by taking this self-management concept, we found the technology is an opportunity to have a self-management mobile applications for chronic disease patients that can help them live healthier lives, that can help them and teach them and coaches them how to self-manage their conditions in their daily life, how to change their behaviors toward more healthy behavior regarding diet, physical fitness and so on, taking their medications, medication adherence. So our innovation is basically a mobile application, which is freemium, which means there are basic features for free. And we also offer premium subscriptions for coaching patients to help them manage their conditions and control them. So our eventual promise to patients is to have no complications or less complications from chronic disease patients. So we are trying to stop chronic disease patients from causing severe health complications. Haifa, back in Tunisia, what are some of the actual problems that you're trying to solve right now? Thank you, Khadija. Well, there are many. So I won't obviously claim that I'm solving everything, I'm solving one little problem. And that is the fact that the ecosystem is concentrated in three, maybe two major cities in Tunisia. And I think that is the case all over the Arab states, the capital and two other coastal regions. Another maybe sub-problem from that one is that the ecosystem is locked. So we do have this elitist mentality, meaning that the ones who really access it usually live in the capital and usually are middle class or upper middle class. And I want to get back to the point in a previous panel that was mentioned, which is making sure that youth are entrepreneurs by choice and entrepreneurs by need. So that's part of what we're trying to do through a social enterprise called the STG camps. So the STG camps is a network for youth in Tunisia and 24 different governments where we provide an alternative system. So different services. Those include well, an incubation obviously for those who want to be social entrepreneurs, an incubation program. But we also provide a community projects program for the people who don't want to be entrepreneurs. And that is completely valid because I also feel like recently in the Arab world, there's this pushing down the entrepreneurship and down the youth. So that's the only way that you can thrive. So at the STG camps, we believe that you know what, you can be whatever you want. And that's the only system where we support you to be the best version of yourself. So you can be a social entrepreneur because we have the incubation, the incubation program that's inclusive and open in 24 and digitally enabled in 24 different governments. We have the community project track for those who want to be, you know, community servants in any way, shape or form, or maybe even innovators, free spirits that just roam the wild and the earth. And then we have political advocacy for the ones who want to be politicians. We need good politicians in this world. And then we have a track for media influencers. So we're trying to really support, you know, TikTokers, Instagrammers, real creators to use those skills and tools that they have for the sake of promoting the STG agenda. And that is the STG camps in a nutshell. We believe that in 10 years from now, if you're a social entrepreneur, then you will have your peers who graduated from the community track project, who would support you in your lobbying and creating clients for you within their neighborhoods. The politicians would support you because they know you already, they graduated the political advocacy track. And then the media influencers will also support you because they have the tools and the platform to do so. So that's pretty much the STG camps in a nutshell. Thank you so much, Dr. Moafa, by the way. So that was that was that one is a last question before we actually answer questions from our audience. So currently, what's the state of research and innovation in the Arab world? And perhaps because you gave us an overview of who's producing research. But I would, if ever you have that data, I would personally be curious to know what research is produced on or about what type, you know, what are the sectors where research is actually produced? Thank you. So, you know, when you look at, you know, when I drill down into the medicine is big in the Arab world, computer science and technology is also some of the arts as well. So basically, there is a knowledge production effort across all categories. And just, you know, it's the nature of the discipline. Some disciplines publish a lot more like in medicine or in computer science than, for example, in the art more in the liberal arts. But the question is it's not about knowledge production. It's about, you know, that innovation, entrepreneurship and how do you move that knowledge, you know, that, how do you, you know, how do you train a professor that's been all his life, publish or perish, and then you go to your colleagues that's moving to your initial innovation, and they think you're some kind of weirdo that you're talking about. Just focus on the bread and butter, which is, you know, let's produce and let's, you know, produce knowledge. And, you know, yes, there are like here, you know, there's a technology parks and there's, but there's still, I still feel there's a disconnect as well in terms of culture. Like, you know, I'm, I'm a researcher. I'm not a businessman, but, you know, social entrepreneurship. Hey, you know what? That's pretty cool because I, you know, a lot of the, we enter academia for a noble cause. I didn't enter academia to be a businessman. Otherwise, I wouldn't have entered academia in the first place. All right. So how do we, you know, social entrepreneurship for me was, you know, doing a lot financially by doing good in society, by keeping things financially, you know, moving. So I'm not, you know, a thesis or that's put on the shelf. So a lot of my students, I, you know, push them to this demo, demo Inver, like have an idea and let's present it. You never know that one idea might, might take off. So as I said, going back just to summarize, yes, there's knowledge production across all sectors. That's, you know, world class. That is, you know, some of the top research work that's been done, but doesn't mean that's translating into innovation entrepreneurship and that we're making products. Yes, there are stories and, you know, you know, I'll end with this, you know, a lot of the products that are produced haven't been, you know, from university have been people that, you know, full-time entrepreneurs, taking this me too, oh, there's an idea that works in the States and trying to localize it here, but we need to move to a U2 kind of way that, hey, you know, some people in other countries are taking our innovations and ideas and localize them in their markets. Hey, you too, you're doing that too. So we need to move that, that, that for me, that success. If other people are taking our ideas and localizing them in their markets outside the region, wow, that's, that's amazing, but I'm sure there might be a few ideas, but mostly it's been the other way around. And that's why we're successful with our, the Emotion Sensing Recognition app where, you know, we took children's drawings and we choose AI to analyze their emotions through an app and ask questions to enable, to help parents and children talk about emotions and to increase bonding between parent and child. So that app, it's unique. There's nothing like that in the world, you know, and I put that challenge to anyone. It was a very unique, it was, hey, very cool idea, but how can I transfer that? I don't even know how to even make that into a financially lucrative type of product. Do I have time to do that? No, I don't. Is it part of my evaluation at the end of the year? No, it's not. So at the end of the day, and intellectual property, I work at a university, so anything that I produce, the university owns, right? And there, they'll be my partner moving forward and all that kind of stuff. So it's very complicated. It's not, there's no one simple answer. I'm talking as an academic in an institution that academic institutions within the Arab world. Yes, if, if I was a full-time entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, it may be different. And how do I, you know, I wouldn't have went to school, you know, university 10 to 12 years to be an entrepreneur. I would just, you know, started from day one to be an entrepreneur. So anyway, my social entrepreneurship has been probably the most like achievable or the most kind of convincing thing for me because I'm still doing, you know, some social good in societies. I'm doing good in society, but I'm also getting some financial rewards to keep this project going. It's not going to make me rich. Well, we hope so, but we'll make a difference. And that's why I joined academia, not to be a business and maybe to be, hopefully, to do good in society. If you mean social entrepreneurship as a label, I'm okay with that. Thank you, Dr. Moefa. And we hope that you get rich one day. As we're reaching the end of our session, I'd like to, so all of you here, I'm going to call up your names for you to give a 30 second kind of hope take away for today's discussion on you undertaking that innovation journey in the region, sometimes alone and sometimes with people that surround you. So Dr. Moefa, back at you, 30 seconds, hope. Me too, to you too. Ahmed. Well, I believe that the challenges in itself carries hope. So every challenge carries, was it the hope to find a solution? So there is always the passion to do this. Let's try to implement contextualized, citizen-centric and specialized interventions, whatever you are, try to do this, and we should be fine. Fatima. Education, cross-sector collaboration, less aid, more work. That hasn't fallen into deaf ear, Fatima. So thank you so, so much. I think this is the end of the Regional Innovation Forum for the Arab States. The ITU is always here to help build a thriving and competitive digital innovation ecosystem in the region. For all of our work, you can connect at innovation.itu.int. And I believe if there are perhaps further questions from the audience, this is now your moment to jump in as we're having another eight minutes or so. Who do we have here? Chiavina, Faisal and Annie. Dr. Hussi, all the way to you. What would stop you from assessing impact of that particular initiative that you mentioned? The one who's supposed to make you rich, remember? That one. Using a simple survey and then automizing data collection as well as report with analytics. Was it a lack of such a tool, perhaps? No, the issue for, it's not the issue about the tool, the technologies, again, putting the time and the effort creating within universities that, hey, in the Arab world, that, hey, this is an idea, let's take it on, let's take it to the next phase and give you time. It's not about just moving forward and giving the academic or the researcher time to develop and to innovate and to spend time. It's not about the training. There's lots of training. And then all the training. It's like industry, like, is there an actual company that, hey, we like this idea, we're going to take it on, we can include you in the process and this way, let's move it forward. So, but that brings up another level of complexity. How do you, you know, who owns the IP? How do you revenue sharing? All these kinds of complexities that come about from this stuff. And I don't think universities are ready or have the policy of the procedures that they're going, they're moving there. And I think this is happening, especially when you talk about science and engineering, but are we there yet? No, is it going to take time? Yes, I think we need some good success stories. Like, hey, you know what? There's a product from these key universities. There like been whatever, multi-billion or multi-million dollar products. And this, these, if we have more of those stories, this will really encourage other universities to start investing in faculty and in their ideas and in their products to move them forward. And again, you know, this concept of, you know, being a white-eater university becoming a professor, if I can be a businessman with an undergraduate degree, you do it for a purpose. And, you know, and this social good, this concept of this noble cause. Anyway, those are our constructs and issues that we challenge with as academics. And hopefully somehow we can consolidate those so we can make a difference in our communities through these innovations and these entrepreneurship and industry, it's not about money at the end of the day, it's about making a difference. I hope that answers that question. I really love that sentence. If there are no further questions from the audience, I'd like to give it up to Karim who wants to properly close the forum. So thank you very much, Hanija and the distinguished speakers of the last session. It's not about money at the end of the day, it's about making a difference. That I think is the perfect note to end the regional innovation forum. I want to thank all the distinguished participants throughout yesterday and today who I think made very, very interesting insights. I hope the participants who were interacting with us throughout both days enjoyed the regional innovation forum. I want to invite you to continue your participation in the Global Innovation Forum and the other regional innovation forums taking place for the rest of today and the rest of the week. I understand there's a very interesting session planned within the Africa Regional Innovation Forum titled Mainstreaming Innovation and Entrepreneurship Capacity in the Africa region with Smart Africa. So I invite you to join that later today. And with that, on that note, this forum is an annual forum, so hopefully we'll see you again next year. Hope you all stay safe. And once again, thank you all for the participants and for the speakers and well done to all the organizers. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you, Khadija and Ahmed and everyone else. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.