Poland hopes its role as a central and eastern European technology hub will help create cross-investment opportunities in the financial, healthcare and food sectors for Gulf investors, according to a senior official.
Pawel Jablonski, Poland’s undersecretary of state for economic and development co-operation, for Africa and the Middle East, was in Abu Dhabi this month to explore ways to expand the country’s trade and commerce beyond its traditional main partners, such as Germany.
There are many areas which Poland and the UAE have common ground, including infrastructure development, which could provide the chance for "synergies" to help "shape the economy of tomorrow", Mr Jablonski told the Business Extra podcast.
"We also see that the market in Europe has its limits, and we want to expand and to grow globally. That is why we are bringing these economic relations to a next level also with countries that are geographically further away from Poland."
With about 250 start-ups in the fintech sector, Poland, the EU's sixth largest economy, is known as a regional hub. This this represents another potential point of collaboration too, he said.
"One sector that comes to mind ... is financial technology, thanks to the fact that we actually started our transition to a free market economy only 30 years ago, and because of that, we obviously were lagging behind in many sectors. We started later, but thanks to that, we managed to overtake those more developed countries," said Mr Jablonski.
Other innovative industries developing quickly in Poland include medtech, agrotech, food processing technologies and food storage.
Clean energy and renewables and water management and waste treatment solutions are also growing sectors.
"We are applying these solutions at home, we are applying them with our neighbours and we also want to export them to exchange our experiences with countries such as the UAE,” Mr Jablonski said.
Poland is also pioneering Smart City technologies "which is, I believe a necessity for the region”, he said.
The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that “we need to be more resilient ... It doesn't mean resorting to ... producing everything at home, we need to co-operate, but these [supply] chains need to be perhaps shorter, perhaps stronger, and we need to have alternatives."
“That is why we want to not only to focus on this traditional direction of co-operation, but also for new ones. Hence, our efforts to strengthen our presence in the Gulf region,” he said.
The 12 countries located between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic seas, forming The Three Seas grouping – which includes Poland – are working together to build up transport, energy and digital infrastructure.
"In central Europe, we are expanding and we are we are strengthening this regional co-operation, especially in the last couple of years … And we work very close together," said Mr Jablonski.
“So when we speak about potential co-operation, I'm representing the Polish government. But also in fact, I'm representing the alliance of these 12 countries, a big, big economy of over 110 million people, growing in size, with unparalleled developments.”
In this episode:
Poland's expansion in UAE (0m 36s) From EU to UAE (2m 31s) Primary sectors for Poland (4m 27s) Competing interests (8m 26s) The diverse market in Europe (12m 27s)
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The distance learning plan
Spring break will be from March 8 - 19
Public school pupils will undergo distance learning from March 22 - April 2. School hours will be 8.30am to 1.30pm
Staff will be trained in distance learning programmes from March 15 - 19
Teaching hours will be 8am to 2pm during distance learning
Pupils will return to school for normal lessons from April 5
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
