Zuma, Kikwete and Tsvangarai Feature at Davos

Posted by Staff Writer on Friday, January 29, 2010 at 12:06pm.

The World Economic Forum, is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world. The Forum provides a platform for decision-makers representing all sectors of society to come together and address major issues on the global agenda

2500 leaders from business, government and civil society, representing more than 90 countries are active participants. Over 1,400 top-level executives from the world’s leading companies are participating this year. Nearly half of the participants have come from outside business sectors, including 30 heads of state (among them, Jacob Zuma of South Africa, Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Morgan Tsvangarai of Zimbabwe), 60 government ministers, over 100 heads or top officials form international organizations and NGOs, over 200 leading academics, and more than 200 media leaders.

The Annual Meeting 2009 theme was “Shaping the Post-Crisis World”. The intent was to absorb the early lessons from the financial crisis and to understand how risks interconnect, to encourage longer term thinking and to consider unintended consequences of various calls for action. The learning and transformation will continue into next year along with increasing expectations for positive change. In response to new priorities, the organizing theme for the 40th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2010 is a call to action, “Improve the State of the World: Rethink, Redesign and Rebuild”.

The pressure to rethink, redesign and rebuild is increasing along with concern over the current state of the world. The fiscal and monetary prescriptions to ease the pain of global economic shocks are now fuelling anxieties about the creation of new economic bubbles. Moreover, the demographic, behavioral and technological changes linked to the collapse in global demand are challenging basic assumptions about the nascent recovery. Major industries are still contending with cyclical and structural threats to their business models. In addition, weaknesses of governance systems, exposed by the financial crisis, are mostly unchanged with respect to looming global risks such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemic.

The Annual Meeting 2010 program will focus on six areas:

• How to Create a Values Framework
• How to Strengthen Economic and Social Welfare
• How to Mitigate Global Risks and Address Systemic Failures
• How to Ensure Sustainability
• How to Enhance Security
• How to Build Effective Institutions

“Global multistakeholder cooperation lies at the heart of the Forum’s mission to improve the state of the world,” said Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. Speaking at a press conference at the World Economic Forum’s headquarters in Geneva, Professor Schwab said: “We have to rethink our values

- we are living together in a global society with many different cultures. We have to redesign our processes - how do we deal with the issues and challenges on the global agenda. And finally, we have to rebuild our institutions.”

“We have to look at the Meeting in the context of what’s happening in the world … and we see that, clearly, the present system of global cooperation is not working sufficiently. So we want to look at all issues on the global agenda in a systemic, integrated and strategic way, and we want to address in particular the issue of global cooperation. This is the reason why our Annual Meeting this year is tailored around the need to rethink, redesign and rebuild.”

All of these discussions and work will continue beyond the Annual Meeting. WELCOM, a collaborative platform that integrates Web 2.0 technology, will enable leaders to build knowledge, share insights and reach out to key stakeholders as an online community throughout the year.

The conference takes place from the 27th through the 31st of January in Davos, Switzerland and can be followed online through web casts here.