DAST Higher Committee mulls key issues with Award's Jury

A statement to this effect was made during a meeting recently held between members of DAST Higher Committee and DAST Jury Panel at RTA's Head Office.

The gathering discussed a number of important topics and the best methods of uplifting the Award's mechanism in the upcoming editions. The Jury Panel will soon embark on the process of assessing submissions made and identifying the top three winners in each category.

The meeting was attended by Abdul Mohsen Ibrahim Younes, Head of DAST Organizing Committee cum CEO of Strategy and Corporate Governance Sector, along with a number of DAST jury members including Dr. Salem Al Shafei, Head the Award Jury Panel cum Transport Advisor at the Department of Transport in Abu Dhabi; Hamdan Al Shaer, Director of Environment at Dubai Municipality; Dr. Rashid Al Shaali,Assistant Professor at United Arab Emirates University, Dr. Ghassan Abu Libda, Wafa Suleiman and Narciso M. Zacarias, Senior Air Pollution Engineer at Dubai Municipality in addition to the members of DAST Higher Organizing Committee.

Abdul Mohsen Ibrahim Younes stressed to the Jury Members the importance of paying field visits to the participants' workplaces to review the practices & initiatives of sustainable transport in place, which qualified the government, semi-government and private institutions all over the UAE to participate and compete in this Award, and vie for winning the first three positions in their respective fields.

"Members from the Award's Higher Organizing Committee along with the Judges Panel will conduct field visits to a number of entities, companies and institutions participating in the Award's categories in implementation of a key criteria of the assessment mechanism approved by the Award's Jury Panel to examine various types of initiatives. This will undoubtedly contribute to promoting the Award's mechanism and rendering it more accurate in selecting winners," added Younes.

"After nominating winners,the Jury Panel will formulate the best recommendations for non-winning companies and institutions offering them insights about how to improve on their submissions in future editions to render them more efficient with better chances of winning in the Award's future rounds," he continued.

The Head of the Award's Higher Organizing Committee issued directives to deploy a number of RTA Emirati employees nominated to co-work with the Jury Panel to shoulder some of the burden and gain the required expertise that merits them to assess nominations to be made in future. He also directed to send certificates of appreciation to the participants in the award and explain the points of strengths and weaknesses in their submissions.

"Since inception, DAST Higher Committee has been striving to uplift its work mechanism in line with the massive development in RTA projects and initiatives. It has also continued quest for broadening the scope of participation in the Award to enable the largest possible number of government&quasi-government entities as well as private institutions contribute to enhancing sustainable transport across the UAE," concluded Younes.

It is noteworthy that DAST Organizing Committee has always sought to make streamline the submission process by upgrading the Award website so that all submissions can be made on-line via rta.ae/dast.