 here at the World Economic Forum. It's my pleasure to welcome you to this World Economic Forum on the Middle Eastern North Africa here in Jordan. And for those of us joining on livestream, I'm going to introduce our co-chairs of the meeting. First, Mr. Omar Al-Ghanem, Chief Executive Officer of Al-Ghanem Industries of Kuwait. It's a Summa Chakrabarti, President of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development based in London. Badaw Al-Qasimi, Chair of the Sharjah Investment and Development Authority in Sherouk, the United Arab Emirates. And John Rice, Vice Chairman of GE. I'll be asking all of our co-chairs to speak about their aspirations for this meeting and to share with us their thoughts on the issues and the important developments that they want to concentrate attention on. Then we'll be taking some questions. We're under a little bit of time pressure because we have the formal meeting kicking off at 10.30. So I'm going to begin by asking Mr. Al-Ghanem to share his thoughts and expectations as we go into this meeting. Thank you very much. You know, if we look at this region, we have one of the youngest regions in the world. In fact, the second youngest after Sub-Saharan Africa. We also have the largest youth unemployment problem in the world, which is if we look at that, you know, why do we have that issue? We have lots of wealth. We have lots of money being spent on education, but we're not getting the traction on that spend. So we conducted a survey amongst youth and trying to understand why that problem exists. And there's some surprising results to that. So of the people who started up their own business and trying to understand what their biggest issue was, most people you think was burning capital. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough money to keep my business going. Unfortunately, across the MENA, the number one problem was government regulation, not fear of capital. So now people who didn't start up their own businesses and when they were asked, why didn't you? And it wasn't access, lack of capital. It was fear of failure. And we have a problem across the region. We don't have bankruptcy laws in most countries. So when a young person looks to start up a business, they face criminal liability if the business fails. That's unacceptable. And I think we here at the web and using this as a platform need to go tell our governments that that's unacceptable. Also, but there's more that we can do as a private sector to engage with youth. And being heading up the regional business council, we have some exciting announcements to make tomorrow around engagement that the private sector is making and engaging with the youth and to provide them with the skills required to be able to engage with the private sector better. Another thing I'd like to touch on is the gender and gender gap that we have within the workforce. The IMF came up with a very interesting, very interesting sort of figure. If you look at the gender gap that exists here in the MENA region and you look at most developing economies, here it's three times as large. If it were only two times as large, it would increase GDP by a trillion dollars per year, 6% increase in GDP per year. And one last point I'd just like to touch on is infrastructure. There's only 10% intra-Arab trade that happens versus 70% in Europe. If you look at the spend that we as MENA spend on infrastructure, it's 5% versus 15% in China. And let me tell you a practical example. So my company is the largest private sector of manufacture in Kuwait and largest exporter out of Kuwait. If we were to send a container out of Kuwait to Qatar, which is within the GCC and within the common market, it takes us up to nine days for that container to arrive. So within Europe, sending container from Frankfurt to Nice, also within the common market, take a day, day and a half. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And now with oil prices coming down, the spend infrastructure increases the productivity of economies, makes our economies more productive. And so it's more imperative now more than ever to do that. And also it spurs economic growth. So it's imperative that we go forward with it. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a similar checkability. Thank you very much, Adrian. And it's always difficult to follow Omar because he's basically said it all already. But I'm going to try and go deeper. I agree with many of the points he's made. EBID is, of course, a newcomer to this region. We're operating only for the last two and a half years in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan, and hopefully more countries to come. We're proud to be here. I'm very proud to have been asked to co-chair this web forum indeed. I think, essentially, the key issue here at the forum and why I'm excited about it is can we come up with solutions? Solutions are the problems that Omar mentioned, which are really about how do we close the gap, which, I mean, what we all know is a great development potential of this region. We know the potential, but for some reasons, the potential has not been achieved. And there is this gap between two. But there are solutions around. We can learn from other regions. We can learn from things that are working within this region. And can we present them? And let me just highlight four areas or five areas where I think very much on the same page as Omar. One would be the SME area. I think we, in EBID, are putting a huge amount of investment into the SME area. What are we learning? Well, we know some good things. This is a crucial engine room in any economy. We know that. We know that it's particularly good for job creation, although many SMEs fail. They're not all successful. So which ones succeed? Which ones fail? Do we understand that? But one of the biggest things I think we're finding from talking to entrepreneurs like Omar is that it's not actually a lack of creative skills innovation that's a problem in this region. It's more the business culture in the SMEs that isn't being nurtured enough. So that's an area I think we need to talk more about. And, of course, SMEs are a good way of also getting to female entrepreneurs in the way that we haven't, so far. Access to finance for female entrepreneurs is very important for them. Secondly, energy. I mean, energy is a big issue for the region, all producers, all consumers, as well. I think we have got to have a much bigger push on energy security, energy efficiency in many of these countries. And take a country like Jordan. It has extraordinary potential, I think, in the solar area, for example. So are we maximizing, frankly, the comparative advantage of many of these countries in the energy sector would be one question I'd have. Infrastructure and transport. I mean, I think that's a very good example we've just heard of some of the issues. It's weird that you often have to go back to Europe to fly to another country in the region. It's just crazy. I mean, the interconnections are just really not good enough. And even within countries, we're not doing enough, I think, on municipal infrastructure, public services, all the way through to just the bigger transport logistical infrastructure. So I think that's very important. And public budgets here are not necessarily, in my view, the answer, because public budgets are under strain anyway. So PPPs, more private sector leverage of private sector financing, we've got to find those sorts of solutions going forward. Lastly, I'd say, and I'm really glad he touched on this, Omar touched on this, it's the investment climate. You know, we don't talk about it that much in this region, but I'm heartened that increasingly I come across political leaders who want to face up to some of the difficult investment climate issues, whether it's customs or tax authorities, whether it's just how long it takes to get a business started, all those sorts of issues we really need to tackle. And I think that's something I want us to see pushing much harder at the EVID as well going forward. But in the end, it's about coming up with solutions to the gap, not just rephrasing the problem. Thank you. Bidu. Thank you, Adrian. Good morning, everyone. Sabah al-Khayr. I'm really pleased to be here in Jordan, and I want to thank the organizers of the World Economic Forum for bringing us all here together to talk about some of the most pressing issues in our region. A little later today I'll be participating in a panel discussion on the youth imperative of the region. And I look forward to hearing some more ideas on how businesses and governments can work together to come up with solutions to youth unemployment and youth inclusion. I'm also interested to see how we can include more women in both the public and the private sector, and how we can encourage them to become social and economic innovation drivers. And lastly, I'm also really interested to see how we can overhaul our education system to meet with the needs required for the skills required in the 21st century. Having said that, I'd like to also see more discussion about what we've achieved so far. Recent studies on global statistics show that actually in the Arab world and in the Middle East, the Arab youth are creating more SMEs and more jobs have been created in the past 10 years. So in actual fact, what we see is that the youth are moving from being job seekers to actually job creators. And more women are taking on leadership roles in both the public and the private sector across the MENA region. And we also see more incubators and more startup funds happening in our part of the world. So there's clearly a movement on all fronts. And perhaps it's been slow, and we need a catalyst to move things forward. But there's glimpses of hope. And I'd like to see more discussion on how we can encourage that more and how we can support these achievements with policy and education reform. I understand there are pressing issues of geopolitics and macroeconomic factors. But I believe that the youth should be at the center of our discussion, especially when we know that in the Arab world, they represent 55% of our population. And I'm sure we all agree that there'll be no peace and there'll be no prosperity if we don't support them. I expect that during the next two days, we focus on the youth as an opportunity for growth and not as a problem to be solved. And if we focus on this opportunity, I'm sure that the governments, the civil society, and businesses can all work together to come up with creative solutions for each country in the region. And finally, what I really like about the World Economic Forum is that it brings everyone together, all the stakeholders, the governments, the businesses, the media, and the youth, to come up with creative solutions and to communicate and collaborate on pressing issues of our region. But it also makes us all feel responsible for the issues that we're facing, and it gives us a voice to express our opinions and talk about our concerns, and hopefully make this world a better place for our future generations. So I look forward to hearing some opinions on discussions on how we can ignite this hope in the region. Thank you. Thank you to John. Thank you very much. And I'd like to thank the WEF for inviting me to co-chair this forum along with my three esteemed colleagues. It's an honor and pleasure to be here. I'd make two points. The first is around the region, the complexity, and the importance of not letting the headlines define who we are or what we do. It's important for companies and it's important for countries. The way that we do that in GE is by ensuring that we have great teams of people localized everywhere so that we get good feedback and good intellectual assessments of what's really happening so that we don't react to headlines which on any given day may be negative or positive. The result of all of that is that we've grown to have 6,000 employees in the region, a much more senior team. It's our largest region in the developing world measured in terms of absolute orders, in terms of growth rate, and in terms of back law. And so for us, the prescription is simple with all of the complexity and all of the individual challenges that any one country may face. We have to sort through it and figure out what our role is. And we frankly have to do it in 170 countries around the world. This group of countries, this region is particularly important to us which is why we wanna be part of this forum. The second point I'd like to make is around jobs. Everybody, everywhere I go, I visit 50 or 60 countries a year. I've been in this region twice this year. Everywhere I go, people talk about the importance of sustainable inclusive growth. It is the goal. Everybody wants to be part of the path to economic progress. Everybody wants their lives and the lives of their children to be better. The fact of the matter is that the transfer function to sustainable inclusive growth includes what? It includes access to financial capital and human capital. It includes job creation without job creation, without the ability to establish economically viable activities. You have no path to sustainable inclusive growth. And obviously if you look at our world, that starts with a foundation that includes affordable electricity, good healthcare, the basic building blocks because you can't develop the human capital unless you have those basic things in place. But without job creation, public and private job creation, economically valuable activities, you have no path to sustainable inclusive growth. Thanks. John, thank you and thanks to all our coaches. We've got, I'm looking here about seven minutes for questions. So can I just get a sense from the room of people who have questions? If you could just raise your hand and I can get a sense of whether or not we are going to be crunching people in or spacing them evenly out. So I know journalism is traditionally one of the shyest professions. So overcome your natural shyness and dive in if you have something you want to ask one of our co-chairs. Lady in the middle, can I get a microphone to you? And can you just tell us where you're from and your name? Which governments are more responsive, less responsive in your proposals to making the results when they're intemperable? Is there any traction on that? Well, you know, we're gonna be engaging multiple governments across the GCC and the MENA region. And so we're in the process of engaging those governments now. And we're hoping to get traction with as many of them as possible. So I don't have a list of the ones that are engaging and not engaging because we're in the process of engaging now. There are certainly rankings published. You'll probably know the doing business ranking and our own competitiveness rankings which give some indication regionally of which governments are progressing and which countries might perhaps have some work to do on all these kinds of issues. We're probably about to run into the opening session. So if there are no more questions, I will leave you to make your way to that session and look forward to welcoming you to a very successful meeting. Thanks everybody. Thank you.