President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi witnessed on Sunday the graduation ceremony of the Future Technology Pioneers initiative.
The ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and Minister of Defence Sedki Sobhy, Minister of Communication and Information Technology Yasser El-Kady, and a number of ministers and senior state officials.
El-Kady said that the Future Technology Pioneers initiative puts all the state’s programmes for capacity building and human resources development in the fields of information technology and communication (ICT) in one place, through offering youth training on the latest technologies in a number of advanced topics.
He added that President Al-Sisi launched the Future Technology Pioneers Initiative late in 2015. “Today, he (Al-Sisi) met with the representatives of graduates of this initiative, which is supervised by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. The initiative includes several programmes for capacity building to work in all fields of ICT,” he noted.
El-Kady explained that these graduates represent more than 5,000 from all fields of ICT. They have received excellent training and qualification courses and passed them with excellence and success.
He pointed out that the young people present today represent the graduates of the initiative, which implements distance learning. The scientific content is provided through the best interactive learning platforms, where graduates received international certificates in cooperation with leading companies and major universities, such as Harvard and Stanford.
The Minister of Communication also said that the youth represent graduates of the intensive and professional Information Technology Institute training programmes, as well as the Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) and the Disability Challenge Programmes. He noted that the time they have will not be enough to review all successful projects, but he promised to present all of them in the Cairo ICT Conference and Exhibition at the end of the year.
Moreover, he noted that investments in youth experts in the ICT fields translate in time to achieve the sector’s highest rate of growth at the state level to increase the sector’s contribution to the GDP to export revenues and attract investments from international companies to establish centres of excellence, research, and development in the new technological parks.
He added that this investment also translates into global assessment reputation from specialised international institutions. For example, the Gartner ranking in 2016/2017 named Egypt as one of the best destinations for the industry in the EMEA region. Egypt also obtained the best destination award in 2016 from the Global Sourcing Association.
“The initiative’s plan was based on training 10,000 trainees over three years and provide them with jobs. The initiative also includes people with special needs. They were trained through specialised programmes to enable them to communicate with others,” he stressed.
El-Kady concluded by saying that investing in intellectuality is the best investment. The graduates demand that they provide all their skills to benefit the country in its challenge of increasing the spread of technology in order to turn the challenges into opportunities for success.
The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has provided training programmes for the initiative of technological learning with full support of all target groups after the approval of the minister to make all the presidential initiative’s programmes for free.
President Al-Sisi listened to one of the graduates about his mobile application that serves tourists, through giving them audio explanation for the archaeological sites, including temples, museums, and statuses. Al-Sisi thanked him for the idea and wished him success.
After that, Al-Sisi listened to a detailed explanation through the video conference about the Innovation Cluster in Borg El-Arab, where Yasser Tawfik, the CEO of a company, explained that his company’s activity in developing software and electronics capabilities with the students helped in taking part in specialised international competitions.
He pointed out that there is cooperation between the Ministry of Communication and the Technological Park, and further cooperation with the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology to help train students. He pointed to the approval of the Ministry of Communication to apply to host the World Robot Olympiad finals in 2019/2020, with the participation of 60 countries.
