Washington, April 27: US President Barack Obama Monday announced a string of new educational and entrepreneurial exchanges with Muslim nations, in a bid to honor his promise to forge a new beginning with Muslims.
Obama delivered a keynote speech at the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship, hosted by the United States after being announced in his landmark speech to the Muslim world in Egypt last June.
He also thanked Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for offering to host the next such summit in his country next year.
“By listening to each other we have been able to partner with each other,” Obama said, announcing that a new US Global Technology and Innovation fund could “potentially mobilize” two billion dollars of private investment.
“Real change comes from the bottom up, and that is why we are here,” Obama said.
Opening the meeting, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said boosting Muslim business not only would help the Islamic world, but would also help US security and trade.
“There are over a billion people living in Muslim-majority countries today, and they represent a vast reserve of under-utilized potential in the global economy,” Locke told delegates.
“It is very much in America’s — and indeed, the entire world’s — interest that you succeed.”
Obama unveiled a series of new partnerships and ventures designed to bring business and social entrepreneurs from Muslim majority nations to the United States and to send US counterparts to the Muslim world.
“Women in technology fields will have opportunity to come to the United States for internships and professional development,” Obama said.
“Since innovation is central to entrepreneurship, we are creating new exchanges for science teachers, we are forging new partnerships in which high-tech leaders from Silicon Valley will share their expertise.”
The Global Technology and Innovation Fund is backed by the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which has received a deluge of applications for funding, which officials say is itself a sign of improving ties.
Each chunk of funding awarded by OPIC is expected to be worth between 25 and 150 million dollars.
Around 250 entrepreneurs are attending the summit from countries across the Muslim world, where America’s image has been tarnished by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The delegates range from a 20-year-old entrepreneur to established figures like Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel prize for his work on small-scale lending.
Polls show Obama has won plaudits across the globe since taking office in January 2009. But nearly a year on from his Cairo speech, Muslims remain deeply suspicious of the United States.
A recent BBC World Service poll of attitudes in 28 countries showed that Turks and Pakistanis still overwhelmingly believe the United States is a negative influence on the world.
The failure to broker a Middle East peace and still-bloody US wars in Muslim countries loom large.
“This is a generational issue, this is something that is going to take time,” the administration official said.
—-Agencies