A question for us
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A dear friend was visiting me a few weeks ago. As we often do, we were talking about the region where we grew up. Big ideas, what’s broken, what could be different. I kept coming back to something that’s been on my mind: that the people who could actually move the needle on science and technology in the Arab world are out there, but scattered. Most of them have ideas. Almost none of them have a venue to share them.
So, during our chat, I had an idea to try to find them. I told my friend I’d put up my own money and run an experiment in the form of an essay contest with the question: what should exist for science and technology in the Arab world, but doesn’t? He immediately got excited and offered support.
I think we should be producers of technology, not just consumers of it. I know everyone says this, but few grapple with what it actually requires: spending real time on hard problems, engaging with them on a technical and scientific level, and building things that didn’t exist before. That kind of R&D requires time and sustained investment and, above all, it requires talent and deep expertise.
The Arab world has the people for this, both within the region and in the diaspora. Those of us who left our countries to develop expertise built careers that are demanding, enriching, and consuming. And somewhere along the way, the ideas we had about home started collecting dust because there was nowhere to put them.
I’m calling it the sifr prize. The full prompt and details are on the site, but the short version is that I want to hear from people who understand a specific problem well enough to say what’s technically hard about it and how they’d start working on it. Not a diagnosis. Not a policy paper.
The prizes are $2,500, $1,000, and $500. We’re funding this out of pocket because we wanted it to exist and nobody else was doing it. As far as I can tell, there’s not been a collective brainstorm quite like this for the region. So it’s an experiment. I don’t know how many submissions we’ll get. I don’t know what fields they’ll come from. I don’t know how good they’ll be1 1 I expect a fair share of AI written slop. . I do know that I’ll read every one, and that I’ll do my best to share what I learn from this process publicly.
Even if nothing else comes of it, we’ll have a clearer picture of who’s out there and what they’ve been thinking about.
It’s easy to feel demoralized about the region right now. I get it. For most of our lives we oscillate between hope and despair. But I believe in resilient optimism. I also believe the people who could change the trajectory of science and technology in the Arab world are out there, and maybe some of us have never been asked. Consider this the ask.
If you’ve been thinking about a problem like this for a while, write it up. If you know someone who has, please send them this.
Read the full prompt at sifrprize.com