Dear Forum Attendees,
The Kingdom of Bahrain hosting the Arab eContent Awards 2009 as part of the Second Bahrain International e-Government Forum, which was based on one of the most important objectives of the country's e-government program within our leadership's ambitious strategic Bahrain Vision 2030. As part of the Arab world we aspire to be leaders in promoting electronic awareness in Bahrain and the region. Similarly we are innovators in finding ways and mechanisms to encourage e-content creativity and bring it to achieve global recognition while also consolidating cooperation among brotherly Arab nations.

eContent today is one of the main drivers for the development of ICT worldwide. Electronic transformation processes will not progress without innovative e-content providing added value to users. The Arab eContent Awards are a way of motivating creativity and of identifying world-class electronic content that focuses on high quality in terms of complexity, originality, inclusion, presentation, engineering, accessibility and accuracy of search results, including browsing and navigation mechanisms.

It is truly a great joy for us to see these initiatives turn into substantial actions, not only in Bahrain, but throughout the Arab world, which encourages us further to display greater cooperation and renew our determination to make more progress and create new initiatives that present a positive and accurate Arab image to the world.

Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa,
Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Supreme Committee of Information and Communication Technology