Raizcorp CEO participates in the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Summit

The 5th World Economic Forum (WEF) Summit on the Global Agenda took place in the United Arab Emirates from 12-14 November 2012. Raizcorp CEO Allon Raiz participated in the Summit as one of the 15 members of the WEF Global Agenda Council on Fostering Entrepreneurship.

“Being able to give voice to the realities of entrepreneurs in the developing world at this gathering of intellectual luminaries from all parts of the world was indeed a great privilege,” said Raiz.

The three-day Summit saw members from across the 88 Councils in the Network of the Global Agenda Councils collectively identify issues and solutions that address serious global challenges in areas such as finance and economics, geopolitics, the environment, society, and technology. The purpose of the Summit was to nurture the ideas and to frame the debates that will shape the agenda at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos in January 2013.

The hive-like setting of the Summit

More than 1 000 of the world’s foremost experts from academia, government, business, civil society, and media convened to discuss the world’s most pressing issues. Working in a hive-like setting, the various Councils were encouraged to develop actionable programmes for the WEF.

“It was gratifying to see that our thinking in South Africa is quite advanced in some areas,” says Raiz. “In terms of programmes to foster entrepreneurship, the importance of context-specific scale was highlighted. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that entrepreneurship in the developing world is rooted on a local scale. It wouldn’t be truly meaningful to extrapolate an example of entrepreneurial thinking such as Bill Gates to the context of a developing country such as Mali without taking the scale of local economic activity into consideration.”

The deliberations at the Summit highlighted various themes and concerns that will be addressed to the world’s leaders at the 2013 Annual Meeting. These concerns are drawn together in the theme for the 2013 Annual Meeting: “Resilient Dynamism”.

Raiz said, “On a personal level, I was extremely proud to be able to work alongside several South Africans on various Councils. Being immersed in the highly academic yet output-focused atmosphere of the Summit was an unrivalled learning opportunity, which has allowed me to bring the latest thinking back home for the benefit of our entrepreneurs.”

To find out more about the ambitious scope of the WEF Global Agenda Council Network, click anywhere on the following graphic.