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Doha,

The Ministry of Transport and Communications (MOTC) is now accepting applications at national level for the “World Summit Awards 2019”.

The World Summit Awards (WSA) is an international competition that selects and promotes the world’s best start-ups in digital content and innovative applications that are having a significant impact on improving society. Combining an ongoing series of international events and activities with a global network of start-ups, social entrepreneurs, mentors, jurors, speakers, experts, government leaders, academics and civil society, WSA seeks to raise awareness and give recognition to the best e-Content produced all around the world.

Companies, institutions and individuals across the country are now invited to join the competition by submitting their best digital content applications to compete in eight award categories, with winners representing Qatar at the world level. Applications will be accepted until June 10, 2019.

The eight award categories are: government & citizen engagement, health & wellbeing, environment & green energy, business & commerce, learning & education, culture & tourism, smart settlements & urbanization, and inclusion & empowerment.

A local jury, chaired by the national expert of WSA for Qatar, Ms. Reem Al-Mansoori, MOTC Assistant Undersecretary of Digital Society Development Affairs, will assess the submissions and select one qualified work for each category to represent Qatar.

The international selection process involves four stages, from local country selection to a global shortlist of five projects per category, and finally the announcement of the winners.  Jury panels consist of renowned international experts. Winners will be announced to the public and will be invited to the WSA Global Congress where they will have the opportunity to pitch their projects to an international on-site panel.

All submissions must be no more than two years old (after January 1, 2017) when submitted to the competition, and may include any applications that offer useful, high quality, innovative digital content such as webpages, interactive and SMS-based products, etc.

Submitted projects should be real ventures that are already up and running. Incomplete trial versions will not be accepted and will be automatically eliminated.

All work must be free of offensive or plagiarized content and may not violate human rights as laid out in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Submissions that encourage war, violence or discrimination, will not be accepted. Similarly, submissions that violate international copyright provisions will be excluded.

Qatari entrepreneur and inventor Mohammed Al Jefairia won the WSA for Digital Innovation 2018 in the Inclusion & Empowerment Category for his project Deaf Pedia - a platform that supports the deaf by offering an open source platform to share and improve sign language.

Those interested in joining the competition are invited to send detailed information on their work to MOTC via email: wsa@motc.gov.qa. Further information is available here.