MANAMA, 22 December 2006 — A group of business leaders yesterday urged the governments of the Gulf and the greater Middle East to spend more on research and development to enable them to address unemployment issues and to be more competitive.
The call came as businessmen and women, mainly from Saudi Arabia, gathered in Manama to officially unveil the establishment of the Arabian Knowledge Economy Association (AKEA).
The founders held elections to select a president for the association, which was first, formed in Dubai, UAE, in May 2005, and discussed preparations for their first conference scheduled for Jeddah in April 2007.
President of Gulf Venture Capital Association, Abdullah Al-Subyani, said that there is a lot of tacit knowledge in the Arab world that needs to be utilized. “We need to think of knowledge as a raw material, like oil,” he said. “There is lack of a holistic perspective to capture our enormous intellectual resources and reserves to become truly competitive and innovative global players.”
He added that the focus of the association is on improving education and R&D to help develop the human resources in the area.
“The aim is achieve continuous economic growth. The valuable human resources here are under-appreciated and the ones that are developed usually go outside the Arab region,” he said. “That is why we are trying to encourage the government, the public and private sectors to focus more on education. The education system is not weak but it needs development and it needs to be linked to economic development plans”.
Al-Subyani said the Jeddah meeting would see the unveiling of the first major report on knowledge economy in the Arab world.
AKEA founding member and vice president of material supply at Saudi Aramco, Esam Ahmed Mousli, pointed out that the reason for unemployment in the region is that the available workforce does not match the needs of the industry. He added that preparing the new generation to meet those needs would help resolve the mismatch.
Director of the Jeddah-based Saudi Entrepreneurship Development Institute, professor V.B. Nanda Gopal, said that if the governments do not focus on knowledge-based industries they are likely to have a slower pace of economic growth.
“There are positive indications in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which is investing heavily in education, but there is a need for more to be done across the region to prepare the future generations,” he said.
Gopal pointed out that prior to the oil boom the whole region was entrepreneurial, adding that the discovery of oil had led to a relaxation of these efforts. “It is a question of attitude. This requires education and a cultural revolution,” he said. “If the cultural revolution is ushered in, entrepreneurship will have potential and the region will boom because it has all the resources.”
