The New Nation - Internet Edition

BSS, Dhaka

Chief Adviser Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed is scheduled to join this week the World Economic Forum (WEF) Meeting in Switzerland to represent Bangladesh for the first time in the high-profile global platform of political, business and economic leaders.

The Chief Adviser is to leave here today on a four-day visit to Swiss city of Davos, the WEF headquarter where 2,500 participants from 88 countries including 27 heads of state or government, 113 cabinet ministers, top executives of global corporate bodies, social entrepreneurs, economists and religious and media leaders are expected to meet.

"This is an opportunity to pursue our economy and diplomacy," a Foreign Ministry official said as asked to explain the significance of Bangladesh's participation in the meeting.

He said, this will be an event where Bangladesh would get the scope to interact with the global political and business leaders while WEF officials said at this year's meeting in Davos, the world leaders were expected to review "The Power of Collaborative Innovation" through greater interaction between the advanced North and developing South.

Dr Fakhruddin is set to join the WEF plenary on January 24, hold an informal meeting with world economic forum leaders, address a press conference for international media and join several other programmes on the sidelines including a meeting with the Asian Development Bank President.

Foreign Adviser Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury and Press Secretary to the Chief Adviser Syed Fahim Munaim are among the members of a small official entourage of the Chief Adviser.

Several other leading personalities and social entrepreneurs including Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus, whose experiment of poor men's banking earned Bangladesh the fame of being the home of micro credit, are also to join the Davos meet to make it more important from Bangladesh perspective.

Conference organisers in Davos said, around 60 percent of the participants were to be business leaders drawn principally from the Forum's members - 1,000 of the foremost companies from around the world and across all economic sectors.

"The unique combination of the world's top business and political leaders, together with the heads of the world's most important NGOs, and religious, cultural and media leaders allows us to approach the problems that face the world in a systematic way and with an eye to tackling the major issues that face us all," a conference organiser said.

"The Annual Meeting gives all of us a chance to understand and shape the Global Agenda for the year ahead and beyond, serving global society by making sense of a rapidly changing world and harnessing collaborative innovation to the benefit of us all," WEF's Founder and Executive Chairman Professor Klaus Schwab said in a press conference earlier this week in Geneva.

He said, the meeting's programme would follow five conceptual pillars that are high on the global agenda in 2008.

The WEF Chief said, these would range from "Economics and Finance: Addressing Economic Insecurity" to "Business: Competing while Collaborating" and from "Geopolitics: Aligning Interests across Divides" to "Science and Technology: Exploring Nature's New Frontiers" as well as "Values and Society: Understanding Future Shifts".

The opening session of the Annual Meeting will address two of the key issues facing the world, climate change and terrorism.

All participants of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2008 can watch the responses to The Davos Question and are encouraged to reply directly to questions from the wider public in the first YouTube video booth set up for this purpose in the Congress Centre in Davos. Some of the best contributions will be used in key sessions in the programme. Of the top 100 companies identified by the Financial Times, Fortune and Forbes, 74 will be represented at the Annual Meeting, with more than 1,370 executives at the level of CEO or chairman taking part this year. People were asked to click on the picture to watch a 7-minute interview about the Annual Meeting with Lee Howell, Senior Director and head of the Annual Meeting Programme Team.

According to WEF documents released ahead of the meeting, a variety of trends and assumptions was expected to drive the development under the principal theme of " The Power of Collaborative Innovation".