Qatar 2030

This is kind of a follow on from my previous post, but I understand that it's not necessarily the solution I'm talking about.

Qatar is a small nation situated on a peninsula in the Arabian Gulf. It has around 1.6 million people, of which only a small proportion are pure-blood Qataris, amongst the highest GDP (PPP) per capita on the planet, oh and the largest single gas reserve in the world. So, it's not short of a few dollars.

It also has an organisation called the Qatar Foundation. Run by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, the Qatar Foundation is quite an exceptional organisation. In anticipation of the country's hydrocarbon reserves running out, QF has developed a vision called Qatar 2030. Qatar 2030 aims to transform the nation into one of the world's leading knowledge economies, a centre of excellence for areas such as technology, medicine, science, education, research and design. Formed in 1995 and launching its vision in 2000, QF has developed and is more importantly delivering on a 30 year game-plan for the Nation without miring itself too much in politics. In Europe I don’t believe we have anything currently which can compete with that.

Having seen the vision in action I would pretty much guarantee that Qatar will succeed in its aims and as all companies or institutions who locate there are joint ventures with the Qatari government, Qatar will jointly own the intellectual property on any developments or inventions that come out of these ventures. Qatar will be one of the world’s leading technical, educational, medical and scientific based economies and equally importantly, retain its position as one of the world’s richest countries.

And another thing, Qatar 2030 has been properly defined and communicated, so both Qataris and Expats know the vision and its aims. They get the purpose of QF and the role it plays as an adjunct to government, without meddling in petty politics. Therefore they both support and appreciate QF.

Obviously Qatar benefits from a fairly blank canvas, or rather desert, is tiny and has buckets of cash. It would be considerably more difficult to replicate a QF model in Europe, but not impossible. I also recognise that Qatar has other issues which we would consider pretty fundamental in Western democracies, however, for the purposes of this blog post I've focussed exclusively on QF.