Entrepreneurship and capacity-building for our youth have always required keen minds to prepare and direct our hope for the future. However, at no time in recent memory has this task been more important than at present.
Even the best of times required vision and dedication to create the UAE’s place in the world economy and put forward the voice of moderation in international affairs. It is certainly true that the pace of change in the UAE has been “fast forward” since the founding moment of the country. However, recent turbulence in world markets coupled with the recent precipitous fall in oil prices, press us to accelerate the pace and quality of preparing the youth to succeed.
We are therefore compelled to redouble our efforts in capacity-building, as His Highness Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the UAE Minister of Culture, Youth, and Community Development (and currently Minister of Culture and Knowledge Development) demonstrated earlier this year by launching the BUNYAN Capacity-Building Initiative for the Empowerment of the youth, thus creating the corps of young BUNYAN Knights from amongst the brightest of recent graduates from the leading universities in the UAE. We must continue to innovate along such lines. The up-and-coming generation must not only “hit the deck running,” but win their races from the start of their careers. The long-term viability of the country depends upon their success and the key pillar of continued future sustainability for our region is to deploy the necessary efforts and resources to give our youth a solid preparation and a rigorous intellectual baggage, as well as providing the commensurate employment opportunities. Prioritizing the empowering, equipping, and preparing our youth, has moved to “center stage.”
The University Leadership Council pools the talent and efforts of the country’s leading academic institutions, so that the best minds work together to accelerate speed and quality of youth preparedness. We speak of welding the synergy of many minds into one collective consciousness for devising solutions that work now. We all know that the “whole is greater than the sum of its separate parts.” It is to this goal that we endeavor with in the University Leadership Council, with our key capacity-building and knowledge generation endeavors, under the patronage and honorary chairmanship of His Highness Sheikh Nahayan Mabrak Al Nahayan.
Under the honorary leadership of His Highness Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, the University Leadership Council integrates the educational parts into the whole, as the critical problems facing the country are solved in real time. This is the approach that has carried us forward as a young, forward-looking nation, and will continue to do so now and in the future.
The leading academic institutions partnering within the University Leadership Council are positioned as the vehicles par excellence for these team efforts, for it is only by drawing together the strengths of so many institutions of higher learning that we could ensure for our talented youth the fulfillment of the full potential they have demonstrated.
We follow in the visionary leadership of the founding fathers of the UAE and the current leadership who continuously brought young talent together as the very heart of the UAE’s meteoric national economic and societal advancement.
It is our mission today to collectively probe educational strategies necessary to equip, guide, and ensure success of up-and-coming entrepreneurial leaders through the innovation in education.
This synergy between leading academic institutions provides the way for us to create the real solutions that are demanded of the times in which we live, and which is empowered and enhanced by the triangulation the University Leadership Council achieves between academia exemplified by the chief academic officers of the leading academic institutions of higher learning, the private sector represented by leading industry leaders, and relevant governmental entities, for the enhancement of capacity-building of the youth.