Roundtable Meeting for Governments (Middle East)

Tuesday, 15 December 2020

The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), in collaboration with the Communications and Information Technology Authority in Kuwait (CITRA), successfully organised the 4th edition of the RIPE NCC Government Roundtable dedicated to Arab ICT Ministries and Regulators in the Middle East region on Tuesday 15 December, which was held virtually under the theme, “Cooperation for better connectivity”.

The meeting, which was opened by H.E. Saleem Al-Ouzianah, Chairman and CEO of CITRA, H.E. Hamad Almansoori, Chief of Digital Government and General Manager of Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in the United Arab Emirates, H.E Dr. Mohamad Tamimi, Governor of the Communications and Information Technology Commission in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Hans Petter Holen, Managing Director of RIPE NCC and Christian Kaufmann, Executive Board Chairman of RIPE NCC, discussed keyways and collaborations to drive in more development and economic growth for the Arab region’s Internet sector.

The event was attended by high level representatives from several Arab countries, including H.E. Loutfi Bashareef, Minister of Information Technology and Telecommunications of Yemen; H.E. Ahmad Al-Hananda, Minister of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship in Jordan; H.E. Dr. Ishaq Sidr Minister of Information & Communications Technology in Palestine; H.E. Dr. Ali Nasser Al-Khoieldi, CEO of the Communications and Media Commission in Iraq; Mirjam Kühne, RIPE Chair and Niall O'Reilly, RIPE Vice Chair, in addition to high level delegations and representatives from Governments and Regulatory Authorities from kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt.

Participants discussed the current opportunities and challenges posed by the management of Internet resources and infrastructure in the Middle East - especially during emergencies such as COVID-19. They also discussed how to adopt a more collaborative approach with governments and regulators and looked at the latest RIPE NCC statistics and figures.

The first panel discussion of this virtual roundtable, which was titled “The RIPE NCC and Arab Governments Cooperation” was led by Chafic Chaya and Hisham Ibrahim from the RIPE NCC. It discussed the collaboration of RIPE NCC with Arab governments and regulators investigated the status of the Internet infrastructure in the Arab countries.

The second panel discussion was led by Chris Buckridge and Marco Hogewoning from the RIPE NCC, which tackled the topic of Internet Governance: Regulations to Support Technology and highlighted the importance of Digital Cooperation, Government Engagement, and Internet Regulations that Support Technology. 

The "Internet Country Report: Gulf Region" is available on RIPE Labs.

Agenda:

The agenda below uses UTC+3 (Kuwait local time). If you are attending from a different time zone, make sure to convert to find the appropriate time.

You can also view this agenda in Arabic.