Dubai: The Arab Thought Foundation launched the fifth annual Arabic Cultural Development Report on Sunday on the sidelines of the foundation’s annual conference, Fikr11, which started on Monday, and will end Tuesday in Dubai.
The report was launched in the presence of Prince Khalid Al Faisal, the President of the Arab Thought Foundation, Arab Culture Ministers and editors in chief of the newspapers sponsoring the report.
The fifth annual Arab report on cultural development, released this year under the title “Knowledge-based Arab Economy”, raises a number of questions, such as have Arabs reached the knowledge community and do they really have knowledge economies? And do Arabs have knowledge-based cultural industries? What is its value and how much do they represent of Arab economies?
The Annual Arab Report is the first Arab funded report to be launched by an Arab cultural institution, covering the realities of cultural development in 20 Arab states.
The report is prepared by leading authors, experts and specialists in various scientific, technological, educational, artistic and creative fields, as well as an advisory board of prominent Arab intellectual personalities.
Al Faisal said that this year’s report has for the first time explored knowledge based economies. He added that the report has nothing but facts — no critiques or elaborations — and those facts were surprising.
“Some smaller countries have achieved much more that bigger countries, which was opposite of what was expected,” Al Faisal said.
Samih Maaytah, Minister of Media Affairs and Communications of Jordan, said that this kind of reports paves the way for the future and is a record of what is happening in the Arab world.
He added that an important question to ask is whether those reports are read by people in power who can create change.
