Secretary General of the Kuwait’s Supreme Council for Planning and Development (SCPD) Dr. Khaled Mahdi held on Wednesday a presentation at the World Bank (WB) on Policy Interventions towards Jobs and Knowledge Reform that are being undertaken in Kuwait.
The presentation was to highlight the outcome of the National Jobs Strategy (NJS) and Knowledge Index for the Public Sector (KIPS) in Kuwait, which focus on how to make the transformation to a knowledge based economy that are part of the Kuwait National Development Plan.
In an interview with KUNA on the sidelines of the presentation, Dr. Mahdi said that he is here “to demonstrate the productive relationship between the World Bank and Kuwait and how successful is the knowledge partnership we had in making evidence-based policies interventions to create proficient and efficient job market in Kuwait.” Mahdi added, “we discussed the human capital development requirements, what the private sector needs, what the public sector must to be improve as well as the necessity of building social protection system away from public employment.” As for the KIPS, Mahdi noted “the index consists of three components, which are the human capital, organizational capital and network capital.” “We did a test on 20 organizations, with more than 2200 people providing us with enough information to come up with a ranking of what are the main entities in Kuwait with a very high knowledge, a medium knowledge management and poor knowledge management,” he added.
He continued that the main finding was that “Kuwait Investment Authority scored the highest followed by the oil sector superseded all the entities in Kuwait when it comes to knowledge management.” Furthermore, he said, “we are planning to issue the same report every three years in collaboration with the World Bank and we are also planning to expand regionally to communicate with the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) in order to adopt the report methodology and report the index.
This will lead to proper benchmarking.” “Here at the World Bank we showed that the report is open for public, this announcement was well received by the work bank management which really appreciate our transparency on sharing knowledge,” he remarked.
For his part, Resident Representative of the WB Office in Kuwait Ghassan Al-khoja told KUNA “we’re very happy as the World Bank to have partnered with Kuwait to support them in developing these reports.
But we are also more happy that Kuwait has developed this knowledge and is now sharing this knowledge with the rest of the world.” On the NJS, he said, “it falls firmly into all the policies that are being implemented in Kuwait towards reforming and ensuring that Kuwaitis have better job opportunities in the private sector.” He added that both of these initiatives are considered “best practices that we’ve seen in the region. In fact, the National Jobs Strategy is now being looked at by many other countries so they can emulate a similar approach.” He continued that the strategy is “now part of the government program, which means it is now something that has full ownership by the government and is currently being implemented.” “Similarly for the knowledge index, we saw that all these organizations in Kuwait and how well they use knowledge or how well they don’t use knowledge and this is a benchmark that will be used now to incentivize these agencies to be better knowledge institutions and that goes towards the Vision 2035 to make Kuwait the hub for knowledge and finance within the region,” he continued.
Al-khoja further emphasized that partnership that the WB has with Kuwait is “strategic, it’s built on the transfer of knowledge from other countries and putting them within the context of Kuwait so that they are implementable, but we’re happy that now what we are seeing is that we are able to take knowledge from Kuwait and spread it around the world. And I think this is very, very important for us to see.” Kuwait Vision 2035 outlines a new economic model for Kuwait based on “developing the knowledge economy, a high performing public sector and a dynamic private sector,” Al-khoja added.

Source: Kuwait News Agency