IT sector could create more jobs for Saudi women.

Summary: JEDDAH: As the Kingdom's young population continues to grow and Saudi women remain an under- utilized resource to the Saudi economy, Badr Al-Badr, managing director Saudi Arabia CISCO Systems Middle East and of SMART and Connected Communities Emerging Asia and Africa, has stated that the development of the Kingdom's IT sector could create jobs and allow more Saudi women to enter the work force.

By SARAH ABDULLAH / ARAB NEWS

"The future of employment and related tasks will be independent regardless of location with only the employee needing to be internet-connected," Al-Badr said in a presentation at the Jeddah Economic Forum 2011 on Monday.

He added that according to an experiment carried out in Amsterdam, CISCO has shown that creating central work centers where many companies can be a positive way of using IT to integrate Saudi women into the local work force in a secure, safe environment.

Al-Badr stated that productivity must also increase to deal with a large population of young citizens in Saudi Arabia that will grow from its current 50 percent to 66 percent of citizens under the age of 25 by 2050.

He also stated that he expects more citizens to become urbanized. Currently only 82 percent of the Kingdom's citizens live in large cities but that is expected to grow to 90 percent by 2050.

"Large populations will put pressure on natural resources and we need to find a way to maximize our cities to boost productivity and this can be done through the establishment of SMART connected communities," Al-Badr said.

He explained that this will be accomplished by connecting all sectors of the government, education, health care, safety and security and real estate into one SMART connection and said that in the next decade he expects 1 trillion PCs to be Internet connected.

"Within twenty years a community of five million using SMART technology can witness GDP growth of 9.5 percent, increase energy efficiency by 30 percent and create 375,000 new jobs," Al-Badr said., adding other benefits would include a 80 percent increase in water consumption, 20 percent reduction in traffic problems and a 20 percent reduction in the crime rate.

To accomplish this vision, Al-Badr said that improvements in educating the work force, initiating solid investment, the establishment of SMART regulations and Private-Public Partnership (PPP) are essential.

As a means of motivating Saudi society to participate in entrepreneurship and solving social challenges such as the need for local job creation, Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X-Prize Foundation and chairman and founder of Singularity University proposed that Saudi government organizations and corporations work together to offer a monetary prize to motivate citizens to come up with seemingly impossible solutions to the Kingdom's most challenging problems.

"Saudi Arabia is very fortunate to have a large young population and should see youth as its greatest asset that can be utilized in building strong productivity," Diamandis said.

He also advised that in order to have breakthroughs there is also required some risk and failures.

"The society should allow risk and failure or there will be no breakthroughs. This will take changing the culture, which is difficult but it is clear that if Saudi Arabia wants to change its future there must be an incentive to make this happen," Diamandis advised.

Speaking on ways the Internet could help create jobs in Saudi Arabia, Nelson Mattos, VP of Engineering Google, EMEA said that to accomplish job creation, Saudi Arabia needs to create a new ecosystem to support job growth and that it will take the collective environment of all citizens to make changes to culture to make the shift.

Google currently has a presence in Dubai and Egypt in the Middle East with plans to continue to tap into the unutilized Internet market in the region amounting according to Mattos to be 80 percent, or 400 million users.

Responding to Arab News on the sidelines of the forum, Mattos said that there are no solid plans for Google to expand into the Kingdom but that the company is always looking to expand in the region.

"In the last few years, Google has been investing broadly in the Arab world C*. Among the countries in the region, Sauid Arabia has one of the best IT and internet environments. The infrastructure is very good and there are fewer challenges to infrastructure than in other regional countries. The matter to tackle and which is missing in Saudi Arabia is the lack of local innovation to adapt services to the local environment," Mattos said.

Copyright: Arab News 2011 All rights reserved.

Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company