Qatar’s journey to digital transformation aligns with the nation’s broader vision to diversify its economy and establish itself as a knowledge-based economy. The country has always been a very active in adapting to new ICT trends, technology and approaches, said Minister of Communications and Information Technology H E Mohammed bin Ali bin Mohammed Al Mannai during the Web Summit Qatar 2024, yesterday.
Minister of Communications and Information Technology shared Qatar’s plans for digital transformation and innovation for the next five years during a discussion themed, ‘Qatar’s Plan For A Digital Future’ with Guy Shone of Euronews. He highlighted the role of the National Digital Agenda (NDA) 2030 to make Qatar a global technology centre to achieve the goals of National Vision 2030 and its strategy.
“We are so happy that the event was supported by H H the Amir and H E the Prime Minister. We are excited about people coming back to Qatar for the next version of the Web Summit, we have a lot of lessons learnt from the summit and hope we can serve you all better in the next version,” Al Mannai said.
Speaking about the goals of Qatar’s National Digital Agenda 2030, Al Mannai said, “The digital agenda is an overarching policy and strategy document for Qatar towards the digitization. Before giving final shape to the digital agenda, we had to go through a long process.”
“We are introducing the new concept of categorisation and the trends that exist today which are mainly three – hyper-connectivity, hyper-compute and hyper-automation and under those three main categories we see all the new technologies and the emerging trends and the connectivity capacity,” he added.
Elaborating on the goals of those three trends, Al Mannai noted the goal is to prepare a ‘hyper generation’ for the future. We have been very liberal about our laws and the policies that we formulate, which have helped us in attracting global attention.”
“I would categorise Qatar as a more of a consumer of the ICT but we need to move ahead. We need to make Qatar a digital economy, making it a specialised industry and ICT producer in a specific field and this would bring a big change.”
Minister of Communications and Information Technology said Qatar has an outstanding infrastructure in world and we are proud of it. “We are one of the fastest networks in mobile and have 99 percent fiber connectivity in the country. We have all the hyperscaler and cloud industry is nourishing in Qatar. It has been a long journey since we started to think about attracting the big hyperscaler that exist today. We have learned a lot from it. I think we are in a much capable position now to start other verticals similarly what we have started in the cloud computing and Qatar is well positioned for that.”
The discussion also shed light on the importance of the role of small and medium-sized companies and the private sector in supporting the national digital economy.
Responding to a query about, how you expect different sectors to reap different types of benefits from the digital agenda between now and 2030, Al Mannai said, “The delivery of the national agenda does not depend on the government only, but also on the private sector and individuals.”
About the Qatar’s Third National Development Strategy for 2024 to 2030, Al Mannai noted that ICT was a foundation sector for every government sector that existed today saying we interacted and depended a lot on them.
