The SAMENA Telecommunications Council successfully hosted the Leaders’ Summit 2024 at Atlantis – The Palm, Dubai. Under the theme “Evolving toward Integration, Intelligence & Sustainability in Infrastructure”, the summit brought together industry leaders and participants from geographies spanning as far as Asia Pacific to North America, inclusive of South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, among other regions.
This year’s Leaders’ Summit was marked by significant engagement from the Industry, with chief-patronage provided by TDRA-UAE and global collaboration from ITU. Mobily joined as a platinum digital partner, while Huawei, stc, Zain, and the World Broadband Association (WBBA) extended strategic and industry development partnership support to the Summit. Leaders’ Summit 2024 provided multiple roundtables and panels as platforms for dialogue on high-priority areas, such as 6 GHz spectrum and new opportunities for the region; sustainable digital development needs of the Arab region; broadband financing approaches to connect the unconnected regions of the world; building cyber resilience for the telecom business; and the implications of Artificial Intelligence for humans, networks, and the business, at large. As significant portion of the Leaders’ Summit was dedicated to assessing 5G evolution and the way forward to accelerate 5G-Advanced to enhance the 5G ecosystem, and to bring the vision for smart, gigacities to reality.
Leaders’ Summit 2024 also highlighted the importance of fair market competition, broadband infrastructure and device affordability to support digital innovation and end-user choice, especially with respect to digital services and ecommerce platforms, in order to ensure acceleration towards digital economies across the regions remains uniform and so that the challenge of digital divides is mitigated. Fireside chats with industry leaders provided personal insights into the challenges and advancements in digital technology integration, and the crucial need for industry and cross-industry stakeholder to action broadband infrastructure development and digital inclusion, which includes to access to financial services.
As a key collaborator of the SAMENA Council Leaders’ Summit, Huawei reiterated its commitment to fostering a connected intelligent world through advancements in 5G-Advanced (5G-A), Cloud, and AI, emphasizing the role of digital technologies in driving industry innovation towards sustainable development.
Bocar BA, CEO & Board Member of SAMENA Council, expressed gratitude towards all partners and participants for their contributions. He emphasized the Summit’s role in catalyzing digital prosperity and highlighted the continued efforts to ensure that digital infrastructure and technologies evolve in a human-centric manner.
The Leaders’ Summit continues to be an essential platform for discussing future trends and strategies in the ICT industry, setting the stage for next year’s industry activities, and setting new trends in how leaders of the ICT Industry congregate, collaborate, and unite to make progress on areas of common interest, and in fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Agenda.
