Lebanon is to receive $153,000 from the European Union to establish an information-technology center at the Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Daily Star reported Monday.
Lebanon's Minister Nasser Saidi and the EU ambassador to Lebanon, Dimitri Kourkoulas, ratified the IT agreement, which aims to narrow the information gap between the EU and the Mediterranean, the Lebanese paper added.
The new center will foster the development of the new economy in Lebanon by, among other things, working toward the creation of a legal framework to support the development of IT, and encouraging technical training.
The agreement, is part of the Eumedis project, also encourages cooperation in IT across the region, and the EU will finance the creation of other such IT centers in each of its Mediterranean partner countries.
EUMEDIS is a project for the development of the Euro-Mediterranean Information Society. The initiative is part of the Euro-Mediterranean Information Society Action Plan.
The project aims at interconnecting through the Internet the Euro-Mediterranean research communities and at launching pilot projects in five priority sectors of intervention, including information and communication technologies applied to Education, Electronic Commerce and Economic Cooperation, Health Care Networks, Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage and Tourism and Information and communication technologies applied in industry and innovation – (Several Sources)
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