Next Monday, the General Secretariat of the Tender Board will open the National Laboratory for Local Content
The General Secretariat of the Tender Board will open the National Local Content Laboratory on Monday, January 13, with the participation of more than 43 government and private entities, in the presence of His Excellency Dr. Saeed bin Mohammed Al Saqri, Minister of Economy. The National Laboratory targets a number of vital sectors, in the fields of energy, minerals, construction, electricity, water, health, military and security.
This enhances reliance on local products and provides more job opportunities while raising the efficiency of the national workforce, developing industrial capabilities, localizing industries, supporting innovation, transferring technology, developing local companies, and supporting their competitiveness.
The National Laboratory has set a number of objectives to achieve a comprehensive roadmap to enhance local content based on sector priorities, in a way that achieves the possibility of implementation and adaptation to changes, while identifying opportunities, challenges, and solutions by providing studies and analyses of the current situation to explore opportunities to enhance local content in the targeted sectors, identify the most prominent challenges facing these sectors, and propose realistic and effective solutions.
His Excellency Eng. Badr bin Salem Al Maamari said: The National Laboratory represents a strategic tool for achieving economic and social development in the Sultanate of Oman, in line with its future aspirations. The laboratory is one of the important tools for promoting sustainable development and supporting the national economy, which contributes to increasing the percentage of local components and resources used in national projects, reducing dependence on imports and strengthening the local economy.
His Excellency the Engineer added: The laboratory will contribute to enabling local companies to participate effectively in major projects, which will increase their competitiveness and provide broader growth opportunities that contribute to their development and expansion. This will have an impact on creating job opportunities for citizens, while focusing on encouraging the laboratory to transfer knowledge and technology to the local market, and helping to build advanced national capabilities in various sectors, to build a prosperous and sustainable national economy.
The Secretary General of the Tender Board pointed out that the National Laboratory for Local Content also contributes to achieving the objectives of “Oman Vision 2040” and the strategy of the General Secretariat of the Tender Board, by increasing the contribution of local content in development projects, diversifying sources of income and enhancing the role of non-oil sectors in the GDP, as well as creating positive competitiveness for local and international investments to provide confidence to investors by ensuring a strong infrastructure that supports local content, which attracts more investments.
The National Local Content Laboratory came to achieve many goals, including integration between the relevant sectors, to ensure the investment of shared resources to achieve long-term strategic goals, and to build effective partnerships with government agencies
The private sector to enhance local content, encourage cooperation between academic institutions, research centers, and industry to support innovation and development, work to engage stakeholders in open discussions to understand their views and needs, and determine a sustainable communication mechanism with all relevant parties, while determining a mechanism for measuring impact, such as setting key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress achieved, and periodically reviewing the action plan to ensure achieving the desired results.
For his part, Eng. Ghaleb bin Amer bin Khamis Al Hinai, Chairman of the National Office for Local Content, said: “We aim to achieve a number of important outcomes from this lab, including creating a national strategy for local content, identifying localization priorities in the targeted sectors and developing detailed and comprehensive action plans, while launching national initiatives to design and implement quality projects that contribute to achieving growth in the national economy and supporting innovation and development.”
Identifying gaps in the local market, by identifying the challenges facing the local content process and finding practical solutions to address them in the targeted sectors. Developing national competencies, in providing quality job opportunities and enhancing training and qualification programs to meet the requirements of the targeted sectors. Working to enhance competitiveness by improving the quality of national products and services to compete in regional and global markets. Achieving integration and building partnerships this is done by facilitating cooperation between the public and private sectors and civil society institutions.