Minister of Communications and Information Technology Dr. Tarek Kamel along with Minister of Education Dr. Yousri al-Gamal and President of Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport Dr. Gamal Eddin Mokhtar signed a trilateral cooperation agreement on organizing the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) due in Egypt next year. 

The agreement comes about within the State’s special interest in IT and software programming in a bid to promote the Egyptian and Arab youths’ performance in this field as well as other educational complementary ones. 80 countries are expected to take part in the international event.

The agreement aims at pooling the efforts of the three parties to set up the arrangements for the IOI in 2008. The contest is organized under the auspices of President Hosni Mubarak who had officially assigned Dr. Kamel to sponsor this international event to be worth of Egypt’s significant status as an organizer and host country.

The agreement stipulates the spreading of IT applications among youths and students under 20 to serve the educational system in Egypt through making available material and human potentials. The agreement also calls for baking the competition of the Egyptian Olympiad in Informatics organized by MCIT four years ago jointly with the Arab Academy. Now, the participation of the Ministry of Education in this Egyptian contest encourages school students allover the country to get involved.

Under the Agreement, the three parties seek to spread-wide the IT awareness among Egyptian children and youths to qualify them to join the age of Informatics and develop their skills in the field. It also encourages young people to join such local and international competitions to build professional IT calibers and promote for the faculties of invention and development.

MCIT would arrange and oversee the implementation of the training program through its 1500 IT clubs spread nationwide. The ministry also undertakes the exams, preliminary and pre-final knockouts of the participant teams and sponsors the IOI contest 2008 along with the other two parties.

IOI is an annual international informatics competition for youths under 20 held in one of the member States in the International Informatics Committee.