Kids from the Jubilee School working with robotic kits
IT INDUSTRY | Ahmad Humeid asks: is there hope for our much-hyped knowledge economy?
The final session of the Jordan ICT Forum, which was held on the shores of the Dead Sea on the 6th and 7th of December, had a stark and alarming message to deliver. The session was entitled “ICT for All”. It contrasted many of the other sessions of the bi-annual Forum, which mostly ranged from the merely informative to the marketing-oriented or self-congratulatory.
Dr Maen Nsour, formerly of the UNDP and today the CEO of the Jordan Investment Board was firing one statistic after to the other to the remaining attendees of the Forum. His message: unless Arab countries do something radical about their economies and their ability to truly build knowledge economies, a demographic time bomb of joblessness will blow up in our faces. He was citing the depressing findings of the 2nd Arab Human Development Report, which he helped bring into being while he was at the UNDP.
When it comes to the production of knowledge, Arab societies are at the bottom of the global stack. Arab student’s performance in math is below average (only Jordan was able to score a little above average, while Saudi Arabia, for example, scored as bad as some of the poorest African countries). Levels of internet penetration are dismally low. In short, the prospects for knowledge based Arab economies don’t look good, and something needs to be done about that.
Then it was the turn of the former Minister of ICT in the Palestinian National Authority Sabri Saidam to speak. He said that one Arab country, without naming it, produced over 100 strategy documents, implementing only two. “We are addicted to strategies,” he said. He then switched to Arabic and pleaded with the audience “We need to move from Kalamologia (Talk-ology) to technology” stressing that meetings in fancy conferences will not produce bread or “e-bread“ for Arab citizens.
The closing remarks in the final session were a strong reminder that a long, hard road is still ahead of the local and regional ICT industries to reach the promised land of the knowledge economy. In Jordan the first steps might have been taken.
A highlight from the first day of the Jordan ICT Forum were the new targets that IT Industry Association Intaj has set for the its members, to be reached by 2011. This comes after the REACH initiative, and industry development initiative launched in 1999, has run its course, with some of its aims achieved, while other still remain open.
By 2011, According to Intaj, Jordan’s ICT industry is supposed to achieve the following targets: Reach a 50% level of internet penetration (it’s 10% now), employ 35,000 people (the industry employs 10,000 now) and achieve US$ 3 billion of annual export revenues (which stand at a reported US$ 580 million today). These are pretty ambitious targets. Take the 50% internet penetration level. For that to happen, the cost of internet access has to REALLY drop. So does the cost of buying a PC.
Speaking at the Forum, Fastlink’s Chief Commercial Officer Bashar Arafeh addressed the low levels of internet usage in the country by reminding the audience that “Internet access in Jordan is more expensive than in Europe, in absolute terms. In terms of cost compared to income levels, internet access is an unaffordable luxury. Broadband access cost per month has to drop below JD 10 and Jordanians need to be able to buy subsidized PCs for less than JD 100”.
No alternative to innovation
Another alarm bell rung at the closing session was the statistic of the dismally low expenditure on research and development in the Arab region. And while the word ‘innovation’ was on many tongues during the Forum, it is time for the Jordanian ICT industry to really start moving beyond selling boxes, integrating boxes or doing a bit of programming inside boxes to the act of invention of the boxes themselves.
Every ICT Forum has a guest of honour, usually an American tech CEO. In 2002, it was Intel Craig Barrett. In 2004, it was Cisco’s John Chambers. This year it was 3COM’s Edgar Masri (who, as an Arab American, impressed the audience by quoting a classical Arab poet who said: “We are a People to whom mediocrity is not an option. We either are there with the stars or we fade to the grave”).
But what do these celebrated CEOs have in common? They are leaders of companies that invented something so useful to humanity that they became billion dollar businesses. 3COM is the company who’s founder Robert Metcalfe invented Ethernet in the 1970s, the networking technology which ended up connection over 50 million PC worldwide.
Not a geek’s conference
Before the opening of the Forum, an American colleague journalist who was covering the conference asked me if this is the geek’s conference of Jordan. I told him that, in fact, this is not the case at all. Business suits, marketing PowerPoints and corporate speeches have the upper hand at the ICT Forum. But in the corner of the exhibition which was held in the lobbies of the King Hussein Conference Center, I saw some very young male and, I am happy to report, female geeks. They were students of the Jubilee School who were displaying their work on robotic kits, with which they intended to compete in an international robotics contest. These young, enthusiastic people, might be our best hope for a the future of our tech industry. If they are not snapped up by Google that is.