There are many Bahraini initiatives that were born from the reform project of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, King of the country, may God protect and preserve him, and they have a history and international documentation, and people seek them annually to participate and win them, and here I mean the UNESCO-King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education, the winners of which were announced from the land of the idea and the beginning of its launch.
Perhaps many of the people of Bahrain did not know about this award before, as it is an international award affiliated with UNESCO and is held annually at UNESCO’s main headquarters in Paris, but after two decades of impressive achievement, it returned to its origin to celebrate the owner of the idea and its sponsor, His Majesty the King. The ceremony to announce the winners was held in the presence of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, may God protect him, on behalf of His Majesty.
Over the course of 20 years, this award has rewarded 34 innovative projects from 21 countries, turning it into a global platform sought out by those with distinguished initiatives in employing information and communication technology to advance education, and it has been able to serve wide categories in various parts of the world.
For example, but not limited to, the award was presented to a national program in Costa Rica that benefited more than 8 million students, in Singapore for a physics project for about 9,800 students, in India for a connected education initiative in 478 schools for 1,767 teachers, another project in the Netherlands for children who are victims of conflict, in Russia to train 30,000 teachers annually, in China to benefit more than 4 million people, and in Egypt to support thousands of schools. And teachers, and Belgium to create online education courses, and in Finland to support an adult education project that benefited more than 80,000 students, and South Korea to support the e-learning space project to reach more than 5.5 million users, and in Bangladesh to deliver education to rural areas.
Here I was not able to enumerate the details of the rest of the initiatives that discuss other topics and serve education with innovations that recently included artificial intelligence, but I sat imagining the amount of goodness that the Kingdom of Bahrain has spread from just one of the ideas of His Majesty the Great King, and I appreciated the thanks, gratitude and gratitude of those with whom Bahrain shared the journey of education and advancement, and contributed to their support.
How great you are, Your Majesty the King. Just one idea made our Kingdom a pioneer in goodness for all people, without distinction between a rich or a poor country. In fact, Bahrain today has the credit over all the countries of the world, and all of that is only from one initiative that arose 20 years ago, so what about the rest of the initiatives that His Majesty launched to this day?
In a gesture that coincided with the organization of the Education Award ceremony in the Kingdom, the University of Bahrain achieved a qualitative achievement by entering the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, within the category of the best universities in the world, for the first time since its establishment in 1986, thus becoming the first local and national university to enter the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. To ensure that we have been on the right path since the beginning of the reform era, which is the path of knowledge and learning.
* Captain – Editor-in-Chief of the English newspaper “Daily Tribune”.
