Information and eGovernment Authority (iGA) Chief Executive, Mohammed Ali Al Qaed participated in The World Government Summit 2023 (WGS 2023) hosted by United Arab Emirates, during 13-15 February 2023 in Dubai city.
WGS 2023 was remarked with the participation of key governments’ leaders, ministers, senior officials, policy makers and global experts from governments, private sector, and NGO’s from more than 150 countries around the globe.
iGA Chief Executive praised the well-organization of the United Arab Emirates for this remarkable event which has been held under the theme “Shaping Future Governments” and aims at the exchange of knowledge and expertise to contribute to in the government development across the world. In addition to addressing the most prominent current and future global challenges to improve people’s quality of life.
As part of WGS 2023, Al Qaed participated in the “Future of Work” forum organized on the 2nd day of the summit, in a panel discussion under the theme “The Future of Employment: Skills and Strategies for Success.
The panel also included Kersti Kaljulaid, the 5th President of the Republic of Estonia government; Jean Koh, Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Digital Platform Government at Republic of Korea; Amandeep and Bhangu, Journalist at BBC.
The session was moderated by Doron Avni, Google VP of Government Affairs and Public Policy Emerging Markets.
During the session, Al-Qaed stressed on the importance of participation in this global event to highlight Kingdom of Bahrain experience and initiatives in reinforcing the development of government work, in-light of the royal vision of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, and the continuous support and directives of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, and Prime Minister, in employing modern technologies and Artificial Intelligence in various sectors including the government work process.
He added that Bahrain has been focused on various modernization initiatives in-line with development plans outlined by its 2030 Vision. Al Qaed also praised the continuous support and follow-up by His Excellency Lieutenant General Shaikh Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, Minister of Interior and Chairman of the Ministerial Committee for Information and Communications Technology, in employing ICT and digital transformation.
This has been demonstrated by the various supportive legislations and policies that support in providing attractive environment for international companies and fostering the emerging technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analytics.
iGA CE explained that the move towards employing modern technologies and the use of AI has become essential requirements to build a strong economy as it provides a range of possibilities and business re-engineering support that attract business capital.
He stressed that strong economy, will add great value in creating new job opportunities in the public and private sectors more than the jobs that may be eliminated due to the automation.
It will also contribute to re-structure the jobs to be with higher wages, in line with the direction of Kingdom of Bahrain headed by HRH the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, which drives us to boost our progress and initiatives.
Al-Qaed emphasized that the government of Kingdom of Bahrain has provided the enabling environment that reinforce national ICT skills in the government as well as private sector through number of national initiatives that can foster innovation in Bahrain.
The “Cloud First” policy, launched in 2017 and the training program launched by iGA and the Labour Fund (Tamkeen) to train more than 900 Bahrainis in cloud skills in AWS and Microsoft contributed greatly in reinforcing their ICT skills and readiness by boosting their capabilities in dealing with hands-on practices to be well-ready for their future jobs.
He also showcased the initiative of “BeAware Bahrain app” which was launched by iGA as a response to COVID-19 pandemic. This initiative has been a unique example of innovative solution that was developed within only two weeks, taking the advantage of the Kingdom’s cloud readiness. Al Qaed Explained that BeAware framework has been integrated with a multiple set of government systems and AI has been utilized, pointing to its many advantages, including its ability to utilize Big Data for detecting interactions and infections with an accuracy rate 30%, in addition to the app ability in reducing the cost of random health checkups dramatically and business continuity to sustain the economic growth.
iGA Chief Executive also highlighted that Bahraini government became the first public sector in the Middle East and Africa to fully migrate its workload (70 entity) to the Cloud environment and empowered more than 25,000 government employees to adopted Microsoft’s Cloud solutions, which have enabled them to safely and securely work from distance during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue the public service delivery to the citizens and residents.
On the other side, this has raised the productivity of employees through saving more than 100,000 working hours per week by removing the time spent commuting to physical meetings.
In regard to the investment in the national skillsets, Al Qaed mentioned that the University of Bahrain has introduced a one-year cloud computing professional certificate, along with a full Cloud Computing bachelor’s degree, being the first in the Middle East, in collaboration with AWS Educate Cloud Degree initiative.
AlQaed stressed that Big Data collection and analysis are the most prominent opportunities and challenges in digital transformation. He highlighted that Cloud Computing has contributed in reshaping the storage, sharing and reachability of files through cloud environment.
He pointed out that the Kingdom of Bahrain has invested this feature through the launch of the National Real Estate Databank, which will contribute greatly to provide comprehensive real estate database. The backend of the system has been developed using the Datalake for Bahrain project through cloud computing services AWS.
He also mentioned several on-going initiatives and projects based on employing artificial intelligence and cloud computing. This includes the launch of the Open Data platform on the cloud to enable individuals and businesses to utilize government data to accelerate innovation.
Moreover, Kingdom of Bahrain is establishing a Genome Centre and leveraging cloud platform to process genome datasets to support health practitioners in Bahrain provide better health services and diagnostics to people in Bahrain.
It is worth mentioning that the World Government Summit 2023 (WGS 2023) hosted 20 heads of state and government, in addition to more than 250 ministers, 10,000 businessmen, government officials, thought leaders and global experts.
Source: Bahrain News Agency