The government of Abu Dhabi has launched an innovation competition with global foundation 'XPrize', allocating 300 million United Arab Emirates dirhams ($81.7 million) to be spent over the next three years, the Abu Dhabi Executive Council announced on Monday at an event held in the UAE capital.

The competition will span and reward innovators in these sectors: energy efficiency, human ageing, food security, water scarcity, artificial intelligence, and environmental conservation.

Earlier on Monday, Abu Dhabi's crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan announced through Twitter the approval of 5.6 billion dirhams ($1.52 billion) over the next five years for research and development on water and food security. (Read more here).

Abu Dhabi has this year launched several initiatives to accelerate the knowledge economy, as a key pillar to make Abu Dhabi more innovative and globally integrated, according to Sara Al Mussallam, member of the executive committee and chairperson of the Department of Education and Knowledge in Abu Dhabi.

“Today we announced an R&D programme where we committed a total of 5.6 billion dirhams to achieve two objectives: increase R&D to reach global benchmarks and to solve problems of sustained importance to humanity,” Al Mussallam told the audience at the event.

 “Abu Dhabi government and the XPrize Foundation will partner to launch a series of XPrize Abu Dhabi competition(s),” she announced, stating that this represented another major R&D milestone.

“We have announced 1 billion dirhams of incentives for agriculture tech companies in Abu Dhabi,” she said. “Yesterday, we announced Hub 71 to establish (a) global ecosystem for tech companies in the region and committed 520 million dirhams for the initiative. Also, to further support this ecosystem, Abu Dhabi government announced (a) 535 million fund to co-invest with venture capitalists in Abu Dhabi- based startups,” she added.

'Hub 71’ includes high-profile founding partners Microsoft and SoftBank’s Vision Fund, alongside state-owned Mubadala Investment Company. (Read more here). 

In September last year, the executive committee of Abu Dhabi Executive Council approved a three-year economic stimulus package worth 50 billion dirhams. Around 20 billion dirhams of this has been allocated for spending this year under the programme, known as ‘Ghadan 21’. (Read  more here).

The ‘Ghadan 21’ programme aims to accelerate the pace of advancement of the UAE capital over the next three years. In English, Ghadan means ‘tomorrow’.

(Reporting by Nada Al Rifai; Editing by Michael Fahy)

(nada.rifai@refinitiv.com)

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