Since their 2015 inception as the Dialogues on Inequality, UNDP’s Istanbul Development Dialogues (IDD) have evolved into a global development forum where policy-makers, business leaders, and diverse experts – from journalists to designers – discuss the issues of our time. This year’s IDD has taken place on 27-28 May 2019, and were dedicated to the reality of global development in 2019.
The topic of the panel discussion that Rafayel took part in was “Putting money to work for sustainable development”. It was moderated by Agnieszka Gajewska, Partner at PwC. It was a rare occasion for the whole conference to have a private sector representative rather than investors or fund managers.
Rafayel talked about his experience of transforming a standard Edutech business into an Impact venture, and the challenges on its way. The educational courseware to bridge the gap between electrical engineers and computer scientists is the core of the IIoThink product. Their team understood that the future engineering employees and even the startupers require to have more broad knowledge about both hardware and software engineering, so they created the IIoThink to meet that need.
He shared his vision towards the future of the life on Earth, which is going to be very much smarter and many products/items surrounding people are going to be equipped with some electronics and will be connected with other things as well as people. So to get prepared to the era of internet of things, every engineer or even user of those things should have broad knowledge about the IoT.
Rafayel also elaborated on their success being part of the UNDP ImpactAIM program, and the support they had received from UNDP team to participate in various international conferences and increase the awareness of IIoThink in the market.
He mentioned that the major Challenge is not mainly the lack of finance, but the challenge to collaborate with Governments, Ministries who are primarily responsible for building quality education system in corresponding countries. Being a Small and Medium enterprise, it is important for RAFA Solutions to have a financial as well as organizational support. But the main goal is to reach the decision makers and financial institutions who understand the importance of the impact of such an educational curriculum and can support the penetration of the latter all over the world. Although they have a valuable and successful product sold to several universities worldwide, they see a challenge in scaling up that success.
Watch the video of the plenary discussion
About RAFA Solutions
RAFA Solutions provides Robust and Flexible Advanced Solutions for Industrial Automation.
We are a system integrator company with extensive software as well as hardware development expertise leveraging advanced technologies. Our high quality automation systems are a result of engineering excellence.
Our engineers have the expertise to build high quality, reliable and cost-effective products and solutions that can take industrial or manufacturing operations to a whole new level of productivity.
RAFA Solutions team can develop detailed system requirements and designs to solve your automation problems starting from a sketch on a piece of paper or your well thought out concept. For more information, visit here.
About Istanbul Development Dialogues 2019
Since their 2015 inception as the Dialogues on Inequality, UNDP’s Istanbul Development Dialogues (IDD) have evolved into a global development forum where policy-makers, business leaders, and diverse experts – from journalists to designers – discuss the issues of our time. This year’s IDD, to take place 27-28 May 2019, will be about the reality of global development in 2019. Four years after the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were unveiled to the world with the most ambitious and comprehensive range of targets – from eliminating poverty to curbing carbon emissions – many countries and organizations are getting up to speed to carry out the SDGs and monitor their progress.