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Saudi Culture, Commerce Ministers Sign MoU to Empower Entrepreneurs in Cultural Sector

The partnership seeks to empower cultural entrepreneurs and organizations - SPA
The partnership seeks to empower cultural entrepreneurs and organizations - SPA
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Saudi Culture, Commerce Ministers Sign MoU to Empower Entrepreneurs in Cultural Sector

The partnership seeks to empower cultural entrepreneurs and organizations - SPA
The partnership seeks to empower cultural entrepreneurs and organizations - SPA

Saudi Minister of Culture Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Farhan and Minister of Commerce and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Small and Medium Enterprises General Authority (Monsha’at) Majid Al-Kassabi signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Wednesday at the Ministry of Culture in Al-Bujairi district, Diriyah.

According to SPA, the MoU aims at fostering collaboration between the Ministry and Monsha’at, particularly through business incubators and accelerators tailored to the cultural sector.
The partnership seeks to empower cultural entrepreneurs and organizations by offering targeted training programs designed to address sector-specific needs. It also includes strategic consulting services to strengthen entrepreneurs' skills and advance their projects through innovative, sustainable approaches. These efforts aim to generate substantial economic and cultural impacts, promote awareness, and raise knowledge about investment opportunities and growth potential in the cultural sector.
Key elements of the agreement focus on enhancing commercial innovation and integrating modern technologies for small and medium-sized cultural enterprises, ultimately contributing to a thriving cultural landscape and bolstering their role in the local economy.
The MoU aligns with the Ministry of Culture’s broader strategy to build strategic partnerships across sectors. It aims to empower entrepreneurs and innovators by providing access to essential resources and opportunities, advancing the cultural sector, and fostering a climate of creativity and innovation in line with the objectives of the National Strategy for Culture under Saudi Vision 2030.

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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient Stonehenge monument on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday — but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture, according to The AP. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”