JEDDAH, 17 January 2003 — Makkah Governor Prince Abdul Majeed will formally open the 2003 Jeddah Economic Forum (JEF) at Hilton Hotel here tomorrow evening. The opening ceremony will feature speeches by JEF and Jeddah Marketing Board Chairman Amr A. Dabbagh, Jeddah Chamber of Commerce & Industry Chairman Abdullah Zainal Alireza, and Professor John A. Quelch, senior associate dean at Harvard Business School.
Among the many overseas participants are Jordanian Prime Minister Ali Abu Al-Ragheb, former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, Malaysia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Syed Hamid Albar, UK Minister of International Trade and Investment Baroness Symons, and Zinele Mbeki, first lady of South Africa.
Regular daylong sessions for businessmen will be held from 10 a.m. on Sunday and Monday. The opening ceremony will be preceded by a daylong forum for women in business, which begins at 10 a.m. and ends with a dinner hosted by Princess Sara bint Abdelmohsen Al-Angari, wife of Prince Abdul Majeed.More than 500 women working in the fields of finance, economy and education in the Kingdom and abroad are taking part in the businesswomen forum.
Dabbagh, chairman of the Jeddah Marketing Board, which organizes the JEF, said that the organizers took into consideration women’s participation from the very beginning.
Nashwa Tahir, owner of a commercial and finance company, told Arab News that the reason for the lack of female participation at the forum in previous years was that it was not organized according to strict Islamic codes. That problem, she added, has now been resolved.
Madawi Al-Husun, owner of several private projects, agrees that the forum is now observing these rules.
“This is an opportunity for those of us who cannot travel with our mehrams (male relatives) to forums abroad to attend a world forum in our own country,” she said.
Olfat Qabbani, a businesswoman, says that the forum achieves three objectives that are important for both women and men. “Ladies can achieve an economic goal by striking commercial deals between Saudi businesswomen and their counterparts in other countries,” she says.
“The forum also allows everyone to achieve an educational goal by exchanging expertise and learning from the experience of other countries that surpassed Saudi Arabia in certain economic fields. Finally, the forum can achieve an information goal by preserving the Islamic identity and educating the world about the situation of women in Saudi Arabia, thus presenting a good image of them to the world.”
