Summit to unveil this year’s knowledge index

dubai — Results of the Global Knowledge Index for 2018 will be announced during this year’s Knowledge Summit in Dubai on December 5-6, it was announced on Tuesday. The index was developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation (MBRF) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The summit’s theme for this year is ‘Youth and the Future of the Knowledge Economy’.

Through the Global Knowledge Index (GKI), the MBRF and the UNDP seek to provide an accurate and objective tool that monitors the state of knowledge in the world, as well as opportunities and challenges around knowledge acquisition. It aims to provide a qualitative analysis of global knowledge to support governments and stakeholders assess performance and create development plans in a variety of fields.

“The Global Knowledge Index is a vital tool to support sustainable development plans, regionally and globally. In partnership with the UNDP, we have intensified our efforts to introduce the index and publish its findings, which reveal the depth of the relationship between knowledge and development in most regions of the world. The results were presented in a series of specialised events that have generated great interest by governments and knowledge entities in a number of countries,” said Jamal bin Huwaireb, CEO of the MBRF.

“We have seen how countries seek to benefit from the outputs of the index and how they use them to adopt the approach of change and development, which prompted us to expand the circle of beneficiaries to incorporate more countries, including Arab countries. We also commenced communication with institutions and knowledge centres around the world to identify the views and ideas of global communities, so that countries can employ these in their sustainable development plans,” he added.

Dr Hany Torky, chief technical advisor of the Arab Knowledge Project, said that the GKI team comprises a group of experts and international organisations, which are currently working on analysing the results of the 2017 index, derived from information collected from 131 countries.

Concurrently they are collecting data from 195 countries for the 2018 index to increase the number of countries within the index and to keep pace with the rapid changes in global databases.

Dr Torky added that the GKI team is consolidating the objectives of the indicator, most notably communicating directly with statistical centres and ministries of education worldwide to provide them with the results of the index.

In parallel, the core team is working with international contacts to identify the weaknesses in the indicators of each country and hence help the relevant bodies address and improve them, thereby enabling them to develop their respective societies. In addition, contact was made with competent authorities in the countries that are top ranked on the index to discuss their experiences in achieving knowledge society, aiming to apply them in the Arab region.

Last year’s GKI was the first of its kind, covering selected 131 countries. The indicators mechanism in each annual index is supervised by an advisory committee that includes international experts from leading research organisations and centres.