CAIRO: President Barack Obama promised yesterday that the United States would encourage more educational exchanges with the Muslim world and invest in technological development.
In a speech at Cairo University, the president said trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and changing communities. “In all nations — including my own — this change can bring fear ... but I also know that human progress cannot be denied.”
The president said “education and innovation will be the currency of the 21st century, and in too many Muslim communities there remains underinvestment in these areas.”
He promised to “expand (educational) exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to study in Muslim communities.”
Obama also promised to create a “new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries” and said he would host a summit on entrepreneurship this year to identify how to deepen ties.
Thirdly, he said, the United States would “launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries, and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create jobs.”
He said the United States would create a new class of “science envoys” and open “centers of excellence” in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. These would seek to collaborate on programs that “develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water and grow new crops.”
