The UAE has reached new heights in caring about its residents’ quality of life, expanding its horizons from real life to the digital world so that it can keep up with the requirements of the comprehensive developmental renaissance.
Over the few past years, the UAE made significant strides in the field of comprehensive digital transformation, evidenced by the facts and numbers highlighted in The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority’s annual report for 2021.
The report showed that residents of the UAE spend an average of 7.24 hours per day online, adding that there are more than 2.66 million digital identity registrants, and 1.2 million users on the digital trust platform for issuing and authenticating digital documents for individuals and companies, conducting nearly 1.5 million transactions.
Given this, the UAE launched 5 strategic initiatives for enhancing the confidence of community members to participate securely in the digital world and get access to distinguished 5-star services.
These initiatives included the formation of the UAE’s National Council for Quality of Digital Life, the adoption of the national policy for digital quality of life, the launch of the UAE Digital Government Strategy-2025, the National Cybersecurity Strategy-2019, as well as Emirates Blockchain Strategy 2021 for Digital Transactions.
National policy
In January 2021, the UAE adopted the National Digital Quality of Life Policy to promote a secure digital community, as well as a positive digital identity that enables individuals to have constructive and meaningful interaction online.
This strategy includes 11 initiatives designed to help build the capabilities of community members as well as promote a conscious and proper presence online, while encouraging positive digital behaviors and values, by guiding the entire community towards using positive content and protecting users from the risks that may arise from interacting with suspicious entities and digital piracy.
Furthermore, the UAE adopted 4 initiatives in conjunction with the launch of the National Policy for Digital Quality of Life to enhance the quality of digital life, which are the Charter for Positive Digital Citizenship Values and Behavior, the “Sannif” platform for evaluating the content of video games, and the Digital Quality of Life approach initiative aimed at integrating digital citizenship topics in school curricula from the nursery to the 12th grade.
The Digital Quality of Life Council
Founded in 2020, the Digital Quality of Life Council is an integrated mechanism for promoting positive digital communities in the UAE, and an initiative aimed at supporting all groups of society, especially families and parents faced with the challenges of the digital world, while raising the levels of social awareness regarding opportunities, challenges, and prevention methods.
The council aims to promote safe digital citizenship and positive behaviors online, through 4 main digital axes: capabilities, behavior and relationships, safety, and content.
The council is also tasked with instilling harmony between the different plans and efforts of government agencies at a national level, with the aim of developing initiatives and programs that can raise the quality of digital life, reviewing legislations and laws, assessing the need to update them, considering proposals submitted by government agencies in this field, as well as communicating with global institutions concerned with digital safety and quality of life.
Digital government strategy
The UAE’s national strategy for the digital government has 8 dimensions, relying on recommendations contained within the framework of The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s digital government policy.
This national strategy is also in line with the development’s plan for post-Covid-19 development.
The main objective of this strategy is to create a broad commitment across a variety of sectors to promote the use of digital tools in all government strategies, as well as provide a unified, integrated, easy, and fast-to-use platform for digital services, tailored to suit the needs of customers.
Cyber security
The National Strategy for Cyber Security is designed to create a solid and secure cyber environment that helps enable individuals to achieve their ambitious goals and companies to grow and develop in a secure and prosperous environment.
The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) launched the updated version of the strategy in 2019, which was based on 5 axes and 60 initiatives and included an integrated system for cybersecurity.
Digital transactions
In April 2018, the UAE launched the Emirates Blockchain Strategy 2021 to adapt and utilize advanced technologies to transfer 50% of government transactions at the federal level to the Blockchain platform by 2021.
The UAE sought through this strategy to document digital transactions using Blockchain technology while allocating a distinctive imprint to digital data that cannot be hacked or altered in any way, which in turn, would raise the level of digital security of national data and reduce operational costs, by reducing paper transactions, and thus accelerate the decision-making process.
Notably, the “Emirates Blockchain Strategy 2021” aimed to save 11 billion dirhams from the annual expenditure of providing and documenting transactions and documents, 389 million official government documents, culminating in 77 million working hours for employees, and 1.6 billion kilometers of driving.
