عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Tawakkalna Wins United Nations Public Service Award 2022

The system won the United Nations Public Service Award 2022 in the category of institutional resilience and innovative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. SPA
The system won the United Nations Public Service Award 2022 in the category of institutional resilience and innovative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. SPA
TT
TT

Tawakkalna Wins United Nations Public Service Award 2022

The system won the United Nations Public Service Award 2022 in the category of institutional resilience and innovative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. SPA
The system won the United Nations Public Service Award 2022 in the category of institutional resilience and innovative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. SPA

Saudi Arabia is seeking to develop digital governance through the national transformation program of Vision 2030 by launching several services aimed at accelerating digitization in the country to promote the quality of services.

The ‘Tawakkalna’ system is leading the digital transformation in Saudi Arabia, linking most of the services needed by citizens, expats, and visitors in one digitally-efficient platform. It also serves as an electronic wallet that includes all the official public forms and has played a significant role in managing the precautionary measures during the pandemic.

Since its launch in 2020, the system has won several global awards, including the United Nations Public Service Award 2022 in the category of institutional resilience and innovative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The award was handed during a virtual event organized on June 23, within the annual UN forum that honors distinguished figures in public service in support of achieving sustainable development goals.

President of Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi explained that receiving this award shows the unlimited support from the government, as well as the empowerment and guidance of the Crown Prince and Chairman of SDAIA's Board of Directors, and his unlimited support for the various initiatives launched by Authority to enhance government collaboration to make the most of data and AI.

Alghamdi stressed that SDAIA was able to accomplish many achievements nationally and globally through the efforts of highly qualified people. He also pointed out that this achievement emphasizes the Kingdom's leadership globally and its determination to attain the goals of the Saudi Vision 2030, and reflects the advanced and reliable infrastructure that SDAIA has.

Alghamdi noted that the experience of Tawakkalna, through all the stages it has gone through, proves the professionalism of the young national cadres who stand behind all the achieved success.

SDAIA has launched Tawakkalna to support government efforts to confront Covid-19 as an application aimed to manage the process of granting permits electronically for government and private sector employees, as well as individuals, during the lockdown, a measure that has helped limit the spread of the virus.

The application launched important services that contributed to achieving a safe return to normal life, most notably explaining the health status of users with the highest levels of safety and privacy.

Afterward, Tawakkalna started to include pandemic-related services such as verifying users' health conditions and health passports, providing Covid-19 test and vaccine services, reviewing health travel requirements, and managing the necessary permits during travel.

The application of Tawakkalna is not only local. Users are now able to use it worldwide as a health passport that proves they are fully vaccinated following an agreement signed with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) aimed at internationally verifying the travelers’ health eligibility in accordance with the best international practices, and accepting the health passport platform as an initiative to digitize health certificates from trusted sources and accredited laboratories in cooperation with airlines.

The United Nations launched its Public Service Award in 2003 with an annual forum to encourage and support distinguished global innovations in the field of public service.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
TT
TT

Jimmy Carter's Woodworking, Painting and Poetry Reveal an Introspective Renaissance Man

(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)
(FILES) Former President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at the Democratic National Convention 2008 at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, on August 25, 2008. (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP)

The world knew Jimmy Carter as a president and humanitarian, but he also was a woodworker, painter and poet, creating a body of artistic work that reflects deeply personal views of the global community — and himself.
His portfolio illuminates his closest relationships, his spartan sensibilities and his place in the evolution of American race relations. And it continues to improve the finances of The Carter Center, his enduring legacy, The Associated Press said.
Creating art provided “the rare opportunity for privacy” in his otherwise public life, Carter said. “These times of solitude are like being in another very pleasant world.”
‘One of the best gifts of my life' Mourners at Carter’s hometown funeral will see the altar cross he carved in maple and collection plates he turned on his lathe. Great-grandchildren in the front pews at Maranatha Baptist Church slept as infants in cradles he fashioned.
The former president measured himself a “fairly proficient” craftsman. Chris Bagby, an Atlanta woodworker whose shop Carter frequented, elevated that assessment to “rather accomplished.”
Carter gleaned the basics on his father’s farm, where the Great Depression meant being a jack-of-all-trades. He learned more in shop class and with Future Farmers of America. “I made a miniature of the White House,” he recalled, insisting it was not about his ambitions.
During his Navy years, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter chose unfurnished military housing to stretch his $300 monthly wage, and he built their furniture himself in a shop on base.
As president, Carter nurtured woodworking rather than his golf game, spending hours in a wood shop at Camp David to make small presents for family and friends. And when he left the White House, West Wing aides and Cabinet members pooled money for a shopping spree at Sears, Roebuck & Co. so he could finally assemble a full-scale home woodshop.
“One of the best gifts of my life,” Carter said.
Working in their converted garage, he previewed decades of Habitat for Humanity work by refurbishing their one-story house in Plains. He also improved his fine woodworking skills, joining wood without nails or screws. He also bought Japanese carving tools, and fashioned a chess set later owned by a Saudi prince.
Not just any customer Carter frequented Atlanta’s Highland Woodworking, a shop replete with a library of how-to books and hard-to-find tools, and recruited the world’s preeminent handmade furniture maker, Tage Frid, as an instructor, Bagby said.
Still hanging near the store entrance is a picture of Frid, who died in 2004, teaching students including a smiling former president at the front of the class.
“He was like a regular customer,” Bagby said, other than the “Secret Service agents who came with him.”
Carter built four ladder-back chairs out of hickory in 1983, and Sotheby’s auctioned them for $21,000 each at the time, the first of many sales of Carter paintings and furniture that raised millions to benefit The Carter Center.
It was rarely about the money, though. Jill Stuckey, a longtime friend who would have the Carters over to her home in Plains, recalled seeing the former president carrying out one of her chairs.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘It’s broken. I’m going to take it home and fix it.’”
He was at her back door at 7:30 the next morning, holding her repaired chair.
Carter compared woodworking to the results of his labor as a Navy engineer, or as a boy on the farm: “I like to see what I have done, what I have made.”
‘No special talent,' but his paintings drive auctions Carter employed a folk-art style as a late-in-life amateur painter and claimed “no special talent,” but a 2020 Carter Center auction drew $340,000 for his painting titled “Cardinals," and his oil-on-canvas of an eagle sold for $225,000 in 2023, months after he entered hospice care.
Carter’s work hangs throughout the center’s campus. A room where he met with dignitaries is encircled with birds he painted after he and Rosalynn took on bird watching as a hobby.
Near the executive offices are a self-portrait and a painting of Rosalynn in their early post-presidential years, hanging across from a trio of Andy Warhol prints showing Carter in office.
Carter’s earliest years predominate, with boyhood farm scenes and portraits of influential figures like his father James Earl Carter Sr., whose death in 1953 led him to abandon a Navy career and eventually enter politics in Georgia.
Some of his subjects, including both of his parents, are looking away. Carter's likeness of his mother shows “Miss Lillian” as a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India. Jason Carter said the piece was particularly meaningful to his grandfather, who lost reelection at a relatively youthful 56.
“When he got out of the White House, she was standing there saying, ’Well, I turned 70 in the Peace Corps. What are you going to do?” Jason Carter said.
One Carter subject who meets his gaze is a young Rosalynn — they married when she was 18 and he was 21. He described her as “remarkably beautiful, almost painfully shy, obviously intelligent, and yet unrestrained in our discussions.”
Another who doesn’t look away is Rachel Clark, a Black sharecropper who had hosted the future president after they worked in the fields. “Except for my parents, Rachel Clark was the person closest to me,” Carter wrote of his childhood.
'Just a word of praise' Carter wrote more than 30 books — even a novel — but was most introspective in poetry.
On his first real recognition of Jim Crow segregation: “A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.”
On his Cold War submarine’s delicate dance with enemies: “We wanted them to understand ... to share our love of solitude ... the peace we yearned to keep.”
Rosalynn’s smile, he gushed, silenced the birds, “or may be I failed to hear their song.”
Perhaps Carter’s most revealing poem, “I Wanted to Share My Father’s World,” concerns the man who never got to see his namesake son’s achievements. He wrote that he despised Earl’s discipline, and swallowed hunger for “just a word of praise.”
Only when he brought his own sons to visit his dying father did he “put aside the past resentments of the boy” and see “the father who will never cease to be alive in me.”