C5 Accelerate, in partnership with Tamkeen and VIVA, hosted His Excellency Engineer Kamal bin Ahmed Mohammed, Minister of Transportation and Telecommunications for the sixth edition of its POLICY HACK series. The event which aims to strengthen communication and cooperation between policy makers and the entrepreneurship and start-up community in the Kingdom, took place on Monday, April 22 and was attended by a diverse mix of entrepreneurs and industry leaders.

During the event, His Excellency highlighted the Ministry’s role in the advancement of the ICT industry in the Kingdom and the key policies to drive innovation and growth in the telecommunications and transport sectors, its commitments to embracing digital transformation and innovation, as well as the Kingdom’s strategic aspirations around the national digitization and aerospace agendas.

The Minister also addressed the much-anticipated  Airport Modernization Programme, which in addition to increasing the capacity of the Bahrain International Airport to 14 million passengers, will offer an overall enhanced passenger experience by the digitization of many of its services with state of the art technologies implemented in the baggage handling system, check in counters and security.

“The Kingdom of Bahrain is seeing a comprehensive line up of strategic projects and initiatives in the ICT and logistics sectors, and it is indeed a pleasure to participate in such events and highlight the efforts undertaken as well as upcoming developments that contribute to sustainable economic development and boosting the growth of the digital society in the Kingdom,” the Minister said. “Governmental policy has set the basis for delivering these projects and initiatives, which has led to Bahrain being positioned to be one of the first countries globally to launch commercial 5G services this year. These services, along with the high speed fibre optic National Broadband Network, will contribute to attracting further investment to the Kingdom and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship in the ICT sector.

The event ended with an open Q&A session with the startup community and networking opportunities.

Hadyah Fathalla, Executive Director of C5 Accelerate, commented: “Innovative technologies are dramatically transforming both the transport and telecom sectors globally and it is exciting to have his HE Kamal bin Ahmed Mohammed share with us the Kingdom’s plans and policies around injecting greater digitization and innovation to grow these industries locally.  The government continues to think resourcefully and pragmatically about regulations and policies, and about building a robust digitally-driven knowledge-based economy in general and we much forward to continuing to work with them and to strengthening public-private partnerships to support this promising direction”.

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C5 Accelerate is a London, Washington D.C., and Bahrain based technology investment firm. C5’s current innovation partners are the Labour Fund (Tamkeen), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Economic Development Board (EDB) and SAP NS2. C5’s mission is to accelerate best-of-breed start-ups to meet the growth opportunity being created by the cloud. The launch of C5’s eighth program will take place later this year in September with a focus on Energy-Tech and Sustainability.  Key areas of interest are Sustainable Cities and Communities, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, and Clean Energy. The Energy-tech start-ups will have access to specialised mentoring by C5’s innovation partners and broad network of industry leaders, and access to AWS Solution architects, to name a few benefits.

Applications for C5’s eighth intake are now open. For more information or to apply, please contact Bader.Sater@c5capital.com