Conference Sessions

The opening session is focusing on the MENA startup scene and its regional and international potential. We will talk with our panelists about how a DAX company has initiated IT outsourcing projects with Tunisian startups, how an Egyptian healthtec fund is strivng towards investments in the African continent and how to put the diverse and successful startup scene of the MENA Region on the radar of German VCs and companies. We will discuss the opportunities and challenges that we will face as we go digital. We will discuss how to best support the region in shaping its own future using digital technologies. Finally, we will talk about the MENA region and its talents and the fact that we are not (just) recipients of technologies anymore. We can shape the future together and make the process open and inclusive because

#OurFutureIsDigital

After a year of blending reality and virtuality, there’s no doubt a new Reality has been formed. Most business transactions went virtual, most physical meetings went virtual, and in the near future a bundle of technologies and experiences will digitally simulate, extend reality or even replace it, this is what we call "Digital Reality".

In our workshop we will explain how Mixed Reality (MR) technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology would open a million doors to a digital future, with application domains such as training, communication, education, healthcare, simulation, entertaining and more.

Whether a fully immersive human experience or with digital content superimposed over our reality, MR provides rich, interactive and compelling solutions.

The workshop will showcase different use cases of XR to create an impact, enhance your business and reach out to new target groups.

Participants attending this workshop will receive an e-certificate of attendance.

The session aims to show how digitalization is changing the face of the logistics industry.

Ports and logistics are very important pillars of the economy. In such an industry with international outreach, and where every transaction involves multiple players, it is very critical to match the international industry standards and way of doing business. In addition, the latest pandemic has shown the importance of digitalization in sustaining this industry on a business level.

On the other hand, last-mile logistics digitalization has been a very important way to deliver goods, especially with the latest pandemic lockdowns.

Furthermore, digitalizing this industry provides new future possibilities and revenue streams in addition to job creation for the new generation.

The session also aims to see how the community envisions the new ways of doing logistics and what issues they might face with such technologies from a user's perspective.

Such discussions can help us close the gap between technology and community in an industry that is becoming a part of everyday life.

Artificial intelligence is disrupting the way we think and do innovation, today.

AI is writing today’s and tomorrow's history of technology and science and we can no longer afford to bypass its impact in our reality. But… What is artificial intelligence?

It’s time to break it down for everyone! This workshop aims to offer clarity on the definition and history of artificial intelligence in a way that can be accessible to non-experts. 

The workshop will cover some of the most essential aspects of AI and more specifically:

• What is AI
• History and origin of AI
• Contemporary rise of AI
• AI vs Human

Participants attending the workshop will receive an e-certificate of attendance.

Our Community Talk addresses inclusion from the perspective of Gender and Ability within the world of technology.

Each of our speakers will provide an overview of the inclusion and exclusion of the communities they care for: women and individuals with different physical abilities.

Throughout the conversation, we will be drawing a new vision for a future in which digital transformation is at the center of social, cultural and economic issues in their respective countries: Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan?

Digitization has ushered the world into a new area affecting practically all aspects of daily life. Digital ready countries such as Germany have seen an increase in economic growth and prosperity notably thanks to new technologies and innovation.

Nonetheless, it seems that countries south of the Mediterranean have not fully embraced the promises of digital transformation.

Starting with Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, this session will discuss DAN's research project done to assess the state of digitalization in the countries of the MENA region and spot areas of improvement as well as suggest recommendations to accelerate this journey across the region.

After the general presentation, the participants will be divided in three breakout sessions according to the countries they are interested in.

With the pandemic and within few months, our work-life drastically changed and here again, less than a year after the “virtual workplace”, we are facing another paradigm that we are not quite ready to tackle: the hybrid workplace.

The session will explore the new challenges we face on a daily basis with our working team and investigate important questions like how to create and sustain a positive and productive hybrid work environment.

The various aspects of the rapid digital transformation in the field of human resources and corporate cultures will be investigated, tackling this from the perspective of the increasing migration of businesses to remote working.

The development of digital platforms is becoming a crucial global asset for scaling and advancing traditional and modern businesses.

The automation of operational and production systems is becoming a key aspect of competitiveness, and its potential is demonstrated not only in its ability to streamline internal processes, but also to become a product itself with increasing market opportunities.

Prof. Dr. Dr. Ayad Al-Ani will lead a discussion on the impact of digital platforms on the Arab economy, the strategies for building Arab platforms and the outlook for automated factories and production processes in the region.

The session will include an in-depth overview of the role and the strategies of Arab platforms for economic development in the region.

The publication of information about the outbreak of COVID 19 in the MENA region was considered a practice of spreading fake news and has led to the trial of some citizens. Some bloggers, journalists and doctors who shared information about the number of infected people were targeted and jailed for publishing the news.

Legislative tools were already in use to “legally” ban websites and to criminalize the right to freedom of expression under the claim of spreading so-called fake news. However, these practices have increased in time of COVID 19 which was dealt by governments as a national security issue. 

This session led by Mohamed Faraht, an Egyptian lawyer and digital rights expert, will cover three main topics:

• The definition of what fake news is from a journalism perspective;
• The impact of fake news on national Security;
• The Legal Criteria of Fake news,
• Presenting a best practice example from the MENA region: Akhbarmeter which uses digital technologies to detect fake news.
  

Over the last century, we’ve seen unpreceded growth and prosperity and yet at the same time these have brought increased social inequalities, an all round environmental crisis from Global warming to horrific biodiversity loss, food insecurity, water disputes and more complex, global challenges.

Therefore, ‘Doing no harm’ is no longer good enough!

We can’t keep doing what we’ve always done and expect different results.

In a world that needs new visions, new skills, new ways of being and doing, and disruptive innovation, we find ourselves looking to the entrepreneurs and increasingly, there has been a global recognition that “Entrepreneurship is a tremendous force that can have a big impact in growth, recovery, and societal progress by fueling innovation, employment generation and social empowerment.” (World Economic Forum).

While this potential for impact is inherent in entrepreneurial endeavor, multiple studies have also shown a specific link between women in leadership and environmental sustainability[1] eg: In Europe: 1% increase in women directors = 7% increase in environmental practice.

These strong orientations towards environmental practices are found in both entrepreneurial as well as established businesses. Similarly, evidence has been growing for decades that women entrepreneurs lower financial and operational risks in a business: [2] and yet this is not reflected in where and with whom investors place their investments, nor in who is supported through structured programmes provided by governments, technology transfer offices, Incubators and Accelerators.
 
This session will explore the current state of play from the perspective of two top European accelerators who support start-ups globally, success stories from each, the challenges of recruiting diversity, and their visions for growing more sustainable, inclusive and profitable business that make the world a better place with every sale and operation.

Solutions journalism is a relatively new genre that has been gaining a growing appeal among Western journalists and media outlets for its ability to engage audiences.

This session is open to Arab journalists, anyone interested in digital media, NGOs and civil society practitioners.

In the first part of the three-hour session, we will introduce this genre to Arab journalists, explaining its main components and how it can be applied to traditional journalism.

In the second part, we will delve into more details about how it could be adapted to digital media content: videos, podcasts and social media. 

The session will be hosted in Arabic.

Participants attending the workshop will receive an e-certificate of attendance.

User Experience, or UX, is an exciting field. It is essentially about empowering people to do the things they want to do, which is both fun and gratifying.

Also, having a great user experience drives business success.
Learning UX, however, can be a challenge.

Since it is a relatively young field, there is no real gold standard yet for how things are practiced, or taught, which can frustrate people who are just trying to learn things the right way, to apply UX immediately to what they are doing, as well as students looking to become practitioners.

In this workshop, we will provide you with great UX tips, hints and principles to make sure your next product will be more successful.

Culture and digital transformation are evolving in parallel?

It’s time to overcome the dichotomy and skepticism around the intersection between the two!

On one hand, it is crucial that the innovative potential of digitization be extended to other relevant areas such as culture, art, and heritage.

On the other hand, culture and cultural institutions play a central role in facilitating a societal understanding of the role of technology in the advancement of social and economic goals.

Dr. Ayad Al-Ani will lead a collaborative session discussing how concepts of culture and cultural institutions are being used to explain, assimilate, and utilize technology to achieve social and economic goals in the Arab World. 

The session will cover important topics such as museums as places for change, digitization strategies for protecting artifacts and the role of AI for the arts, and involve prominent professionals from the field.

Agenda: 

1. Museums as places for change: Feedback, strategies, and ideas from the region.(Carsten Siebert & Ayad Al-Ani, Barenboim-Said Academy and Digital Arabia Network, Berlin).
2. Digital Preservation: Experiences from the Arab Image Foundation (Kristine Genevive Khouri, Arab Image Foundation, Beirut).
3. Using Artificial Intelligence for the Arts (Nora Al-Badri, Berlin).
4. Experimental Museology (Prof. Sarah Kenderdine)
   

The session will host a discussion on challenges & opportunities of digital transformation in Sudan in relation to business: looking at the current changes of the digital scene from the perspective of SMEs considering the lifted sanctions and COVID-19. As well as, exploring the roles of data analytics, digital marketing, and fintech in digital transformation.

To benchmark and learn from the experience of other countries in the MENA region, a presentation on the Tunisian ecosystem will be held followed by a discussion on the dynamics of the emerging ecosystems in the region including Libya.

In many ways, the arts and cultural sector have benefited from technologies such as the Internet that allows for previously unimaginable levels of connectivity.

Many in our community now have access to an amazing set of tools to reach and cultivate audiences, patrons, and supporters.
We now have more ways than ever to create, collaborate, and connect with our peers, partners, and audiences.

As the field becomes more and more decentralized and the old infrastructure gatekeepers start to lose their power, new technologies and networks present us with seemingly unlimited choice and flexibility.

This, in turn, allows us to carve out a new and vital public space that serves the needs of communities.
How did the creative clusters in the MENA region navigate through this revolution? And how did Covid-19 accelerate this movement?

Online Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is a serious problem in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. With the rise of smart technologies and platforms as popular means of communication and socialization, women of all ages, especially female youth, experience both sides of the digital world: empowerment and oppression/violence.

At the same time, strategic efforts and discussions to address online GBV in the region have been both rare and slow. Therefore, there is an urgent need to unpack the legal, psychosocial and technical dimensions of online GBV.

DAN is proud to dedicate a session at Rakameya 2021 to shed light on these dimensions.

The session will be co-hosted by Salam@ program (Digital Safety for Women and Youth in MENA) at the SecDev Foundation. Salam@ is a MENA-wide program that is operating in six Arab countries (Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco and Tunisia) and aims at increasing public awareness of digital risk and best practices, including online GBV, and build the lasting capacity of women, youth and CSOs in the region to operate safely online.

The following topics will be discussed by a panel of experts from the region:

1. The findings of the DAN mapping of initiatives related to online GBV in MENA.

2. Comparing the existing cybercrime laws in the region.

3. Share real-life cases and stories of online GBV and its psychosocial impact on women in Algeria and Bahrain.

4. Recommendations and call for actions to collectively and effectively mobilize resources and efforts to address online GBV in the region.

E-commerce is booming in the MENA region and it's presenting interesting market and business opportunities, including employability.

The session will bring on stage a Q&A with some of the brightest minds in the e-commerce space in the Middle East to discuss how different countries across the region are taking leaps towards empowering e-commerce as a smart exit from the pandemic era.

We will shortly talk about the potential of blockchain technology within the tokenized economy and decentralized governance context and will show how to introduce community currencies for the mobilization of diaspora experts, impact investors, business partners and local change-makers to contribute to innovation project and social entrepreneurship activities.

After a short presentation, we would like to open the discussion to talk about potential use cases, opportunities, and challenges in the MENA region. 

Our goal is to inspire and motivate the participants to think about alternative cooperation and economic models that can facilitate collective value creation and resource sharing across all borders.

For some Arab countries, this textile industry makes up a significant percentage of their exports (40 percent for Tunisia) and plays an important role in employment (17 percent in Egypt).

Moreover, the market seems to have a specific geographic orientation: MENA exports mainly to Europe. Growth has stalled since the millennium. Interestingly, there has been little branding of the Arab textile industry to date, although this is intended to change with the creation of an Arab fashion council, which aims to establish an industry based on “creative knowledge” and to generate “20 Million jobs for women.”

Notably, this initiative aims at establishing a kind of global division of labor among Arab countries, where the North Arab region supplies raw materials, the Levant becomes a manufacturing cluster, and the Gulf countries focus on retail and merchandise.

Although digitization and robotics are not explicitly mentioned in this initiative, they will have a severe impact on the industry, especially on manufacturing.

Currently, robots – sewbots – can produce towels, pillows, rugs, and other rectangular goods. Progress in robotics will minimize human capacities in the production process significantly, as robotic sewing machines will be able to reproduce any piece of clothing within the next 5–7 years.

This would mean the loss of the Arab textile and fashion industry’s competitive edge, mainly low wages, while its other factor, closeness to Europe would also become less important. The session will cover the following topics

1. How will new technical developments change the industry in the near future? (By Dr. Thomas Fischer, German Institutes of Textile and Fiber Research) 2. Building Egypt's Textile Industry 4.0 (By Hany El Habibi, Sahara Group).

An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. In other words: you decide what topics you want to talk about, and work on.

• Open Space (“Open Space Technology”, OST) is a specific form of an unconference that starts with an empty schedule. No times are set, no rooms are allocated, no topics are mandated, no separations made between “speakers” and “audience”. All participants work out a schedule by suggesting, planning, holding and evaluating sessions, collaboratively.
• Participants and Flow Anyone who is interested to present an idea, a business, a question or a topic and has a plan to facilitate/lead the session.
  The “presenter” will pitch his/her idea at the beginning of the sessions in 1-2min. participants could “register” to the session.
• Afterward, we would create a plan of time and rooms to help “participants” have their breakout rooms The Cafeteria will always be open for participants to have informal conversations.
• We will have 30-45 min sessions and at the end each “Session” will have 1-5 min to “report back” on learnings from the session Finally all participants will have the chance to vote for their favorite “session” and prices will be granted.

DAN is proud to present its study on digital media initiatives and platforms in the MENA region. This is the first study of its kind and it consists of four different categories (fact checking initiatives - specialized journalism - podcasting and journalist support initiatives).

The internet and social networks have opened the door for journalists, audiences and entrepreneurs to play a role in shaping today's media landscape. At the same time, the new reality changed the way journalists face the new challenges of fake news, speed of reporting and personal security concerns. As well, it changed the way media addresses the audience and how the audience interacts with media.

Join the session to get the main findings of the DAN study and discuss with three top experts of the media landscape in the MENA region.

Re-thinking MENA is an online event that will gather culture managers, curators, and artists from the MENA region to discuss together how digitalizing the art and culture became now during the pandemic and how digitalizing the art and culture opened the art scene to new audiences.

Re-thinking MENA will be an educational and entertaining event about art and culture in our daily life now.

Re-thinking MENA will be a place to think together on how arts and culture will be in the coming years, how it will have access to the new generations and how this will change in the behaviors of new generations in future.

To answer these questions, we will have discussion with experts who have a leading role in the Arts in North Africa and the Gulf.

Some interesting links:
http://www.arabmedialab.org/

http://www.digitalmarrakech.org/en/

Cybersecurity is a topic that everyone should pay attention to. Whether you are an entrepreneur or you are "just" using the internet for online banking, e-commerce shop, or even social media, this is a session to attend. We will be sharing the latest news on cybersecurity from Germany and what we need to do in the MENA region to have an efficient cybersecurity strategy. We will talk about whether remote work/home office is safe, what cybersecurity strategies should SMEs have, and much more.  Further, the session will share a great best practice example from Jordan by Int@j which is an incubator program for cybersecurity companies and startups in Jordan.

We are honoured to have Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung, close this year Rakameya 2021. With the motto #OurFutureIs Digital . Dr Matthias will present a closing keynote:

“Putting People Front and Center. What the History of the Future of Digital Transformation Tells Us”.

Does the world owe the MENA region a debt for having brought forth the discussion about the democratic potential of the Internet?

What are the cases of negative and of positive uses of AI and digital technologies in the region?

Which roles do the people of the MENA region need to play to develop their own positive vision?

Please join us at the closing session debating AI Algorithms and challenging the norms in internet governance.