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QS Higher Education Summit Gathers Middle Eastern and African Leaders to Discuss Innovation Prospects

To explore innovative ways of meeting the changing skills and labour needs of a rapidly changing world, 2022 QS Higher Ed Summit: the Middle East and Africa will open this week in Dubai.

Also known as QS-MAPLE (for Middle East and Africa Professional Leaders in Education), the three-day summit will explore what innovation means, the ways it can be fostered, and its importance in addressing shifting and overlapping priorities at a country and regional level.

It will also focus on ways to push innovation by higher education, the business community, and students.

Organised by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a leading provider of services, analytics, and insight to the global higher education sector, the summit will feature leaders from both regions and the world to discuss how to create an environment that empowers innovation through measures such as forming institutional and industry partnerships, developing pedagogy and research priorities, and identifying the challenges that need to be addressed.

Diverse List of Speakers

Speakers will include leaders of a number of American, international and local universities in the MENA region, as well as business leaders, entrepreneurs and policy makers.

Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh, chancellor of the United Arab Emirates University and cultural advisor to the president of the Emirates, will give the opening keynote address.

“The summit will generate new ideas essential to forecasting and planning for higher education systems and programs that will meet the needs of diverse populations in a complex and developing region.”

Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh
Chancellor of the United Arab Emirates University and cultural advisor to the president of the Emirates

Other keynote speakers will be Abdullatif AlShamsi, president and chief executive of the Higher Colleges of Technology, the Emirates’ largest applied higher educational institution; Fadlo R. Khuri, president of the American University of Beirut; and Noora Bint Khalifa Al Khalifa, chief executive of Medpoint Design and The Nine Training Center, in Bahrain.

Discussion panel leaders and other speakers will include Haifa Fahoum Al Kaylani, founding president of the Arab International Women’s Forum; Wafa El Garah, a professor of management information systems at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco; and Mahlubi Chief Mabizela, a policy director in the Department of Higher Education and Training of South Africa, among many others.

New Ideas Are Essential

In his welcome message, Nusseibeh said the summit “will generate new ideas essential to forecasting and planning for higher education systems and programs that will meet the needs of diverse populations in a complex and developing region.”

The Middle East and Africa regions are in a transformational period, the summit’s organisers noted. Skills and labour needs are shifting, student demands continue to develop, and economies across the regions are maturing at a rapid pace.

“Meeting the needs of all – their education and professional formation, the satisfaction of employers, and the demands of sustainable environments and societies – is far from a simple and small agenda,” Nusseibeh wrote.

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In a partnership signed late in February, QS made Al-Fanar Media an official media partner for the 2022 QS-MAPLE conference. This will enable Al-Fanar Media to invite its readership to participate as delegates in the conference.

The hybrid conference will run from March 1 to 3 at the Shangri-la Hotel Dubai and online.

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