World Summit Award successfully concluded in Cairo, Egypt

The World Summit Award, the global partner of Manthan Award and mBillionth Award hosted the 2011 function in Egypt form 26^th to 29^th April 2012 to felicitate and recognise the awardees from all over the world after a year long wait.  As per plan, Ministry of Communication and IT, Republic of Egypt was supposed to host the WSA Gala and the Winners Conference last year but due to Arab Spring and protests in Egypt, it got postponed. Surprisingly, amidst the unrest in the country, the ministry gave the nod and organised the hosting of WSA 2011 on the occasion of ‘Cairo ICT Summit 2012’, an annual mega event to bring the African and Arab countries together. In 2012, Cairo ICT Summit, along with more than 400 companies in its exhibition, hosted the WSA Gala, an official award of the United Nations World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) to felicitate 40 awardees from across the world. This year, WSA Gala recognized two Indian awardees called “Peer Water Exchange” in the e-Environment category and the other “Empowering India” in the e-Governance category. While the Peer Water Exchange is a global web-based exchange platform related to any information pertaining to drinking water and sanitation, the Empowering India is known for its website called empoweringindia.org, where it tracks and aggregates the content related to all the contesting members in the parliamentary and the legislative constituency election from all over India. Both ‘Peer Water Exchange’ and ‘Empowering India’ has been recognized by Manthan Award earlier in 2009 and 2010 respectively, from where they had been shortlisted and nominated for WSA and finally won the global award.

WSA also hosted the Winners Conference where all the participants and winners showcased their products and services to the audience in the Cairo ICT Summit 2012.  As a special session, WSA also hosted a discussion on Mobile for Poor where Mr. Osama Manzar, chairman of the Manthan Award and the mBillionth Award and also the member of the board of directors of the WSA presented the best practices in terms of Mobiles for Good as an example from mBillionth Award and it was highly appreciated.  Further, Mr. Manzar also hosted and moderated the Winners Conference session related to e-Learning and e-Education.

Famous for the diversified role in hosting Mobile Content Award this year, WSA is into its second episode and will also be hosting the next WSA Mobile Content Award in Abu Dhabi later this year.