Dubai: The UAE bagged two awards for having the ‘Best Mobile Government Services’ during the closing ceremony of the sixth World Government Summit (WGS) on Tuesday.
From a total of seven categories of this award, Dubai Police’s app won in the Protecting Human Life category and the UAE Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation’s app was selected in the Enabling Business Category.
His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, was present during the summit’s award ceremony, where he also honoured winners of the Edge of Government Award, which went to Kenya, and the Global Universities Challenge Award.
Now in its fifth cycle, the Best Mobile Government Service Award, which received more than 3,000 nominations from 77 countries, sought to honour pioneers in their race towards solving common global challenges and benefiting humanity.
Lieutenant-General Shaikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, honoured the winners in the seven categories of the award, including education, environment and transport.
Dubai Police were selected over two finalists from the UK and US for providing the public with an integrated app that offers a wide range of services — from reporting traffic accidents to making fine payment and receiving rewards. The app was also recognised for making use of advanced technologies such as augmented reality.
While the UAE Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation’s app was chosen for providing an outstanding range of services to users — from informational, interactive and transactional services and also access to work permit status and more.
The second main segment of the WGS awards was the Best Government Emerging Technologies Award, which recognises governments that are experimenting with technologies and have proven results of how they have created greater public value.
The top three winning government initiatives in this category were Australia’s national cities performance framework, Tanzania’s farmers portable DNA sequencing and India’s Aadhar. The winners received their awards from Shaikh Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential Affairs.
Also honoured were winners who participated in the world’s biggest virtual hackathon, which is organised to build global solutions for future challenges. The award received over 800 participants, students, developers and designers.
Mobilised Construction, a Kenyan company, bagged the Edge of Government Prize for their software and hardware that provides jobs, safe roads and economic development in places that are the hardest for the government to reach. The solution was said to have the potential to be replicated across the world.
While the Global Universities Challenge Award, organised for universities worldwide to design concepts of what the government of future will look like went to London Business School.
There were more than 100 graduate students from 17 top universities and business schools from around the world who competed in this category.
