In the 23rd session of the Council of Arab Ministers of Communications and Information technology, held at the coveted Ritz-Carlton hotel in the Saudi capital, it was officially announced that the Kingdom’s capital Riyadh is all set to stage over as the Arab League’s Digital Capital for the year 2020.
The unanimous decision call taken by all ministers’ present in there for bestowing coveted title to Riyadh is due to the fact that Riyadh has a significant role for the adoption and apt utilization as well as promotion of the digital technology frontier for the enhancement on the socio-economic development, advancement of health care, improvising the education sector, and ultimately surging of community welfare.
Overall the Saudi Arabia’s Information and Communications technology (ICT) sector climbed 16 places in the WEF (World Economic Forum’s) global competitive index 2019 in terms of the overall ICT adoption and benefitted the Kingdom’s GDP by 4 percent. It also gained a lot of coverage and was at the topmost position in ease-of performing business ranking during the World Bank’s 2020 report.
The Arab Digital Capital initiative aims to encourage the creation of a noteworthy scheme for investment in ICT, activate initiatives to develop information inside the ICT business across Arab countries, and adopt new comes to assist grow technical school entrepreneurship within the region.
The Kingdom’s ICT sector is that the largest within the Arab world and has practiced important regulative amendment, expressed across many public and personal sector investment drives since the launch of Vision 2030.
The Kingdom is also the Middle East region’s biggest ICT markets, ranked 13th globally and has an estimated net value worth $28.7 billion (SR107 billion) in 2019 and dominated with the growth of both consumer and enterprise-based segments.
The Kingdom is also a huge emerging market of the young, dynamic tech-savvy population and is one of the quick technology adoption nations, having the highest global social media utilization. During 2019, the net Mobile subscribers stood at a whopping 43.8 million, which represented 129 percent penetration amongst the overall population.