The Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat has delivered a speech at the 30th International Conference on Management of Technology (IAMOT 2021), organized by Nile University in collaboration with the University of Pretoria in South Africa, on September 19-23, under the auspices of the ICT Minister.
In his speech, Talaat said, “In Egypt, we have embarked on an ambitious national project we call Digital Egypt. This means having individuals who are ready to use technology safely, efficiently, and to its maximum potential. It means having institutions that are capable of adopting technology to achieve gains and efficiencies. It also means having an ecosystem that can contribute to the world’s wealth of innovation and Intellectual Property (IP).”
He added, “We are laser-focused on our objective, namely to help the country achieve its development goals, creating better lives and opportunities for our citizens, and playing a strong role in the global discourse around the management and governance of these new technologies.”
The ICT Minister stated, “In Egypt, we have realized the importance and lofty promise that emerging technologies hold, and we have therefore embarked upon developing our National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy two years ago, and we are now working on the national strategy for smart cities. We have created more than 10 innovation hubs around the country, and we are investing heavily in early-stage tech startups.” “Crucially, we are enabling the technology education of over 200,000 people annually across all skill levels, multiplying our capacity building and human development budgets by 20 in only three years,” he added.
He underlined that the pandemic has posed a great opportunity for individuals and nations, adding, “Many countries, Egypt amongst, have greatly accelerated their digital transformation plans, whether by expanding their networking infrastructure or digitizing more services or deploying emerging technologies, such as AI, blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT) to help accelerate the transformation.”
Talaat highlighted that due to the pandemic, Internet usage has soared, increasing by over 70%. The use of communication applications has risen by 300%, and video streaming services have grown almost 20 fold. Companies have become more open to fully remote work arrangements, and previous barriers based on location or nationality are coming down fast.
He said that governments should start adopting startup-related approaches; supporting the startup ecosystem by launching incubator and accelerator programs for making it easier for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to participate in government projects; and facilitating innovation by availing large compute infrastructure and open data sets around which startups can build business models.
“This deepening dependence on technology has also alerted us to other aspects of it we need to pay attention to, such as ethics; regulations; social, economic, and financial impact,” said the ICT Minister. He added that research and development teams have to include, in addition to technical experts, domain, ethics, social, legal, and economic experts to be able to develop safe and responsible solutions.
Under the theme “Management of Technology for the World of the Future,” IAMOT 2021 is supervised by the President of Nile University Wael Akl and chaired by IAMOT Founder and Former President of Nile University Tarek Khalil.
