Company joins hands with Libya’s Ministry of Planning to focus on future strategies

KEO International Consultants, a MENA-based project management, planning, design and engineering firm, was invited by the Libyan Ministry of Planning to jointly sponsor and organise a two-day event, titled ‘Building a New Free Libya’, focused on the country’s immediate and long-term planning and reconstruction strategies and priorities. Revealing this in an announcement, KEO added that the event was held as a series of workshops from March 19 to 20 in Tripoli. The topics included a focus on Programme management services, Urban and master planning, Infrastructure master planning, Wastewater planning and Contract administration. Reportedly, a delegation of the top KEO executives from its technical divisions led the workshop seminars on Day Two of the event, during which, the experts presented management and procurement approaches that have been adopted successfully in various GCC countries with an in-depth analysis of lessons learnt on mega projects as case studies. In its presentation, it compared key development challenges that Libya will face to those experienced in the growth of GCC countries over the last decade, it claimed.

According to the announcement, the Prime Minister of Libya, Dr Abdul Rahiem El Keib, attended the morning session of the event and gave an introductory speech to welcome over 250 guests that included ministers, government officials as well as heads of agencies, undersecretaries and senior leaders involved in the reconstruction of Libya. The Minister of Planning, Dr Issa Al Twaijer opened the workshop with a presentation on Libya’s history in development planning and the challenges faced. Dr Al Twaijer also unveiled the Ministry of Planning’s roadmap on how future developments will be managed.

The announcement pointed out that this was the first event of its kind since the liberation of Libya, where the attention was entirely devoted to the government’s initiation of transparent methods to restart planning and construction projects in Libya. Commenting on this, Donna Sultan, CEO of KEO, said: “We are honoured to have been invited into such a forum by the Ministry of Planning in Libya, at such an important time in Libya’s history. We took very seriously what we felt was our mission in the workshop, to add meaningfully to the dialogue of what Libya will eventually decide as the most appropriate strategies for managing future project delivery cycles. In preparing for the workshop in Tripoli, we had to draw deeply into KEO’s extensive MENA and GCC experience in delivery of projects in the past 50 years.”