The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is preparing to grant roughly 100,000 golden visas to the top programmers worldwide, which appears to be excellent news for anyone involved in the software sector.
A long-term residency option offered by the UAE, the Golden visa is much sought after by professionals from many fields dispersed over the globe. The emirate wants to become a hub for tech investments, which is why it is offering to issue Golden Visas in such big quantities.
Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, and Chairman of the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, emphasised the need for digital transformation and the desire of the emirate to fully utilise the potential of the digital economy, whose growth over the past 20 years has doubled as quickly as that of the global GDP.
The comments were delivered at the tenth edition of the software development and artificial intelligence (AI) workshop hosted by the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, which was attended by business moguls, entrepreneurs, industrialists, and journalists, among others.
Al Olama stated that a strategy was being developed with key stakeholders to strengthen the digital industry by making sure that all government policies encourage innovation and business friendliness.
“The UAE is involving all relevant parties in building a clear roadmap to stimulate digital industries, and ensure that current government policies, initiatives and strategies promote innovation and business friendliness for all sectors,” he said.
Dubai has been a leading country when it comes to banking, hoteling and services sector but the country’s aim to move towards technology and reap its benefits comes from its ideology to diversify the revenue streams of the country in much the same fashion as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is thinking.
The Golden Visa for tech professionals is in line with the vision that technology would change the world and innovation is the next big thing to be pursued by countries if they want to stay float in the age of digital transformation.
Both United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia seem to have made it a point that the age of oil has long gone and new trends like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Business Analytics and other fields are the ones to be pursued. The bid to attract programmers through the Golden Visas seems to be a step towards the same direction.
First implemented in 2019, the UAE Golden Visa residency programme enables expats to live, work, and study in the UAE without the need of a national sponsor and with 100 percent ownership of their business on the UAE’s mainland.
With the promulgation of Fresh regulations, the UAE Golden Visa will grant 10-year residence to investors, entrepreneurs, exceptional talents, scientists and professionals, outstanding students and graduates, humanitarian pioneers, and frontline heroes, who pass certain eligibility benchmark.
The UAE is bagging multiple awards when it comes to immigration as its passport is also the world’s most powerful travel document.
Travellers carrying a UAE passport can enter 180 countries hassle-free; this means seven more countries than European countries such as Germany and Sweden, and nine more than Japan, whose travel document was ranked as the world’s best earlier this year in a list published by Henley & Partners.
