I would like to express my appreciation to His Highness the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, for his gracious patronage of the Knowledge Economy Forum (KEF), which demonstrates his unlimited support to the importance of building a highly productive human capital that is key to
long-term economic development, given that our future is hinged to the extent by which knowledge, innovation and the capability to establish a knowledge
economy is mapped to the 3rd Millennia and to knowledge cities.
The Forum meets amidst global transformations and challenges, the most important of which is building a creative and resilient human capital that is capable of keeping pace with accelerated change while leveraging investment opportunities that are embedded into current challenges to create growth, progress and job opportunities in alignment with modernized job markets of independently-employed technically skilled labour. However, in order to achieve this goal, it is of paramount importance to re-think the entire education system from pre-primary education to life-learning programs, and to ensure that learning outcomes are coherently responsive to labour market characteristics of the 3rd Millennia requiring qualified human talent that has technical and professional competencies.
Central to this transformation is a System of Knowledge Economies that leads global economies toward growth, diversification and distinctiveness, that is Research & Development (R&D) intensive and that is able to provide markets with innovative entrepreneurial ideas that can be industrialized into goods and services to boost the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
In this knowledge-based environment, it is significantly important that public policies are designed to encourage eagerness and inventiveness in today’s young people who shall grow to be tomorrow’s innovative leaders.
The 21st Century is a time of tremendous economic and digital transformations leading global markets to hit record growth rates and reaching the targets of development goals, mainly: productivity, entrepreneurship, competitiveness, and the ease of doing business while bolstering knowledge markets that begin and end with the human capital.
Kuwait’s 3rd Knowledge-Economy is organized in collaboration with Kuwait’s First Human Capital Forum entitled “Building Human Capital from a Knowledge-Economy Perspective”, to shed light on Kuwait’s Vision and the global goals by focusing on Human Capital as the core drivers of Knowledge-Economy that leverages knowledge, innovation and digitization in the 3rd Millennia.