Beyond all imagination, Qatar has been able to clear every doubt that trailed the announcement by the Federation of International Footbll Association, FIFA, on November 9, 2010, that the Gulf State won the hosting rights for it’s most important tournament, the FIFA World Cup in 2022.
Justifying the decision to award the rights to Qatar, former FIFA President Sepp Blatter said, “The Arabic world deserves a World Cup. They have 22 countries and have not had any opportunity to organize the tournament”.
Blatter also praised Qatar’s progress: “When I was first in Qatar there were 400,000 people here and now there are 1.6 million. In terms of infrastructure, when you are able to organise the Asian Games (in 2006) with more than 30 events for men and women, then that is not in question”. Even at that, doubts persisted and a campaign of calumny was orchestrated by some countries that felt offended or were unconvinced by FIFA’s defense. However, the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), ably led by Hassan al Thawadi has since inception been working hard to ensure they proved Doubting Thomases wrong and give the world the best World Cup experience ever. Apart from working to beat projected delivery time for the various construction works, the committee has also come up with a lot of innovations that have kept improving the working conditions for the thousands who are working at the sites. Recently, the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) distributed thousands of cooling vests to the workers recently. Mahmoud Qutub, Executive Director of the SC’s Workers’ Welfare Department, said: “The cooling vest has the potential to transform the lives of our workers”. Before the vests, the SC had also distributed cooling helmets. The technology is spreading. “We want our workers to really benefit from the concept of this technology and, after putting the TechNiche products through rigorous testing, they delivered impressive results.
“We recognise the impact such products could have for anyone working outside in hot conditions. It’s another example of developing solutions to protect our workers that also have the potential to leave a tangible human and social legacy,” Qutub said. The innovations pioneered by the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy have sparked off similar inventions, using the same technology in neighbouring Gulf States. The latest is the fabrication of a cooling suit in the United Arab Emirates by an Emirati Engineering student, Aryam Ahmed. The Emirati Engineering student saw a worker collapse from heat-related causes and she decided to provide a solution to the problem which is perenial in the region. She spent two years in developing the suit.”It started when we saw a fainted worker on the street and we could not do anything about it,” she recalled. Aryam now hopes with her invention, well over one million outdoor workers in the UAEwill lead more comfortable lives and at the same time increase their productivity.
While others have in the past attempted to invent cooling suits for outdoor labourers, they have often been designed with complicated fans or water-based cooling systems, Aryam’s design which she achieved in partnership with Latifa Al Seiari, is simple and safe. It will succeed where others failed. Above all, the cooling suit innovation is no doubt, one of the multiplier effects of the 2022 World Cup on the Gulf Region and the world at large.
JEM NEWS
Comments