- (Silence)

- And now ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honour to introduce Doctor Hany Helal, Minister of Higher Education in Egypt and Minister of State for Scientific Research.

- Ladies and gentlemen, please join me welcoming Doctor Hany Helal.

- Claps

- Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is really an honour and a great pleasure to be with you and thanks for your invitation for this eminent gathering that I have the pleasure and honour to be one of the speakers in the opening session.

- It’s an honour because it’s the moment in Egypt that we are working hard in order to restructure our science and technology governance in Egypt.

- I’m not going to repeat, maybe I comment one or two issues that have been raised by my colleagues.

- But in Egypt for certain time we’re being driving our economy on resources and I think now we are trying to have our economy based on demand driven on knowledge society.

- To drive the economy to knowledge society and have our economy based on knowledge.

- I think we need to work hard to have science and technology the driving force for this change.

- And this is what we are trying to do actually.

- There are many challenges, we have some difficulties, but I’m sure that with my colleagues in all institutions, universities, scientific circles, the library of Alexandria and our colleagues abroad,

- we have many of them, we are sure that we will go rapidly and successfully during this change.

- We are reforming our governance of science and technology to have it more flexible, more determined and to have all the stakeholders on board for this reform.

- Also we need to have the scientific base and technology and the think tank for the sustainable development of Egypt.

- We have many new issues, that we are trying to work on it, but what we’re trying to do is to reform the government system, enhance our institutions and focusing and concentrating in some fields.

- and some disciplines that we are sure our Egyptian scientists will make a difference within the next decade for Egypt.

- I know that Egypt or our Academy of Science and Technology is a member of your panel, and we are glad that our scientists are contributing for the success and the production of valuable issues among which, one has been using in our study actually in Egypt.

- As for Africa, I think we’re working hard for Africa, as Doctor Hassan said, we had an extraordinary ministerial Conference of Science and Technology Ministers in Africa, last week.

- and Ismain was one of the main players in having this Conference.

- Despite of the difficulties that we usually have in ministerial conferences, successful went and I think that the Cairo Declaration for Science and Technology for the summit is a strong one and we hope that we will have strong political commitment from the summit next January.