Ebenezer Dare is a leadership coach who is passionate about business technology management. He is the co-founder and CEO at Hostlag Limited, a domain name and web hosting company. Ebenezer started Hostlag Limited with 200 dollars in 2018 and as at 2021, Hostlag acquired two other hosting companies in Lagos.

Ebenezer also co-founded Justnet Technologies Limited while he also serve as a member of the board of directors for BillsRecharge.NG and Cardinence Investment Limited.

Ebenezer is a digital marketing expert, author and entrepreneur. He is also a business analyst, project manager, motivational speaker, writer, trainer and a friend of God.

He has certifications in computer science from Lagos State University (B.Sc) and certifications from the University of Alberta Canada in Software Product Management and India School of Business in Business Technology Management.

He is also a certified Project manager from University of Irvine USA, he also has certificates as a software tester and software test manager from International software test institute. He was also recently certified by the International CyberSecurity Institute as a certified network security specialist (CNSS).

Ebenezer is a member of the Nigeria Internet Registry Association (NiRA), Internet Society (ISOC-NG), and many others.

He currently serve as a volunteer consultant and coach with some of the leading online platforms where he trains business owners, aspiring entrepreneurs and youths on a monthly basis on Business, Internet and Digital Marketing.

Ebenezer is happily married to his beautiful wife Oluwatosin and blessed with wonderful children.

Dr. Stanley Mpofu's vision is to build an ICT department that is relevant and agile, deals with issues with urgency with an aim of contributing to a university that is in a digital state, competing internationally". The COVID-19 lockdown forced the Dr and his team to move swiftly in scaling their capacity to provide students with access to the Learning Management System.

The Dr has also established the current ICT operations and the environment has established a Digital Program with clearly identified deliverables. His team has by using AWS has successfully migrated its LMS platform to the cloud, Wits can also ensure that its Sakai LMS environment has high availability and is fault-tolerant. This means that even at peak demand, students and lecturers can access Sakai, whereas the previous on-premise solution could not handle peak demands.

Graduated from Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering (Electronics and Communication) in 1976, he got his Masters and Ph.D. Degrees, Microelectronics specialization in 1982 and 1987 respectively from National Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble France. Dr. El Tahawy was a co-founder of ANACAD (The first startup company in Electronics Design Automation for Analog). Mentor Graphics acquired ANACAD in 1994, where he became the WW AMS Engineering Director as well as ANACAD General Manager. In 1998 he returned to Egypt and got the overall responsibility of Mentor Graphics Egypt as a headquarters to Arab countries and North Africa.
He is currently a Mena Region VP of Siemens EDA (Siemens acquired Mentor Graphics in 2017) under his responsibility include today (plus the Egypt site) a development site in Morocco and Tunisia.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hazem-el-tahawy-976165/

Why we nominate him:
• Electronics Business Guru
In 1995 Egypt operation start with 3 engineers and today after 25 years the overall MENA region is:

• 700 Engineers working in developing advanced technology.
• More than 400 Technical papers and 40 Patents
• The outcome value is worth more than $170 M for the company.

• Youth Education & Talent Development
Starting from 1995 Mentor supported first Egypt University (10 universities) by its tools and technology to empower Electronics design education (Each University bundle worth $2M at that time), this extended to most of university and technical institutes in the MENA region as well as some of African countries, today we have more than 120 university logos.
• Post Graduate Studies
In 1998 first Electronics Design Diploma supporting industry need for capacity of talent engineers to be hired by (Mentor, newly born companies, Governmental Industry bodies) which was the key step towards ITI (Information Technology Institute) success story in empowering capacity building in Electronics Design as well as Embedded Design needs.
• Electronics Market Growth
Mentor under the leadership of Dr. Hazem played crucial role model inspiring entrepreneurs (spinning out form Mentor directly or from the companies already went out from Mentor) to establish their companies and growing the Electronics design companies. From one single company in 1995 to more than 80 companies including the Embedded Design Applications. Examples of success Si-Ware System, Silicon Vision, MemsVision, brightskies and Valeo. Over 3000 engineers are now working in this industry.
• Public – Private Partnership
Driving cooperation with the different Government organization such as Ministry of Communication and Information (ITI, ITIDA, NTI, TIEC and SEEC), Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific research (Universities in different governorates as well as Scientific Research Academy), Ministry of Military Production and Ministry of Education (Vocational training organizations). Dr. Hazem was the
• Regional Activities
Dr. Hazem Extended the cooperation in MENA region with key Industry and governmental partners such as:

• UAE (Dubai Silicon Oasis, Mubadala, Masdar City and Ben Rashid Space Technology Center, Arab Science and Technology Foundation, ICT Fund),
• Saudi Arabia (King Abdelaziz City for Scientific Technology, TAQNIA, PSATRI),
• Qatar (Qatar Technology Foundation),
• Jordan (iPark, JUST, PUST),
• Tunisia (Smart Tunisia, FIPA, FUPA, TELNET),
• Algeria (CTDA, DACTA, Bomare) and
• Morocco (Morocco Electronics Cluster, MED Sourcing, AMICA).

• Social & Voluntary Society work
Being a technology Eco System development partner, Dr. Hazem gave valuable time to work in different civil society associations in Egypt and MENA region such as EITESAL, Morocco Electronics Cluster (MMC), Arab Foundation for Technology Foundation (ASTF), Tunisia Cluster for Microelectronics, Jordan ICT Association (Int@g) and Arab ICT Technology Union.
As entrepreneurship fan he used to lead capacity building of young engineers when participated in establishing EBNI, the incubation arm of EITESAL NGO for Electronics Design and Embedded Development applications.
• Strategy
Dr. Hazem, in his capacity as EITESAL Chairman, lead a team of 27 industry experts & faculty members to draft the first full scale strategy document to develop the Electronics Industry in Egypt targeting the creation of 100 design companies & contributing 6% to Egypt’s GDP. in 2016 the strategy was adopted by the President as a national program which is currently in progress.
• Testimonials

• Without the role of Dr. Hazem, EiTESAL couldn’t have reached its current status as the unique effective ICT industry representative (Dr. M. Shedeed)
• Valeo is currently hiring 1600 Development engineer. The Work done by Dr. Hazem in implementing the extensive academic programs allowed Valeo to find the needed calibers (Eng. Hicham Arafa)
• I have been working with Dr. Hazem for years & my company was spined off Mentor Graphics. Thanks to Mentor school (Dr. Hisham Haddara)

Nermine El Saadany is the Undersecretary, International Relations Division and Senior Coordinator for Egyptian IG task force. She served as the Vice Chair of the (WSIS+10) Multistakeholder Preparatory Platform, Vice President of the ITU – WTDC 2014, Vice President of the ITU Plenipotentiary Working Group in 2010 and the IGF 2009 Senior Coordinator with the IGF Secretariat, meantime Diplo Foundation Board Member since 2010 till present and Vice President of the ITU Arab Prep Group for ITU – PP 2014.

From 2005 to the end of 2008, El Saadany served as the Director of the International Relations Department at the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA), where she was responsible for coordinating the positioning of the NTRA in the international arena. In this post, she worked on opening new channels for cooperation between the NTRA and other regulators and international organizations, thereby fortifying Egypt’s regulatory position on the international level.

El Saadany started her career as a researcher in economics, conducting extensive analysis of national and international events dealing with economic problems and their impact on political bodies and decision-making processes.

As an editor of the economics section of Al-Siyassa Al-Dawliya (International Politics Journal)—one of the most prestigious and reliable periodicals in the field of international relations in the Middle East, El Saadany gained extensive experience in the area of research and analysis. Her experience at the journal was also broadened to include website management.

She then held the position of a Unit Manager at MCIT International Relations Division, helping her to gain experience in handling relationships with specialized agencies, drafting strategic goals and objectives and assisting in achieving them.

El Saadany’s diverse career has included acting as the master of ITU Telecom Africa in 2004 for all operations within Cairo and outside Egypt, and also as liaison officer with the ITU headquarters in Geneva; acting as the ITU Telecom Department focal point at the World Telecom event in Geneva, October 2003; and being responsible for the ‘e-message’ sent by President Hosni Mubarak to invite the world to ITU Telecom Africa in 2004.

Since 2002, El Saadany has gained extensive experience in ITU activities. She has served as an active member and deputy head of national delegations at several ITU conferences and meetings including plenipotentiary conferences (2002 and 2006), the ITU Council, World Telecommunication Development Conferences (2006), Telecommunications Development Assemblies, ITU World Telecom (2003 and 2006), and African and Arab preparatory meetings for ITU plenipotentiary conferences.

During the preparation for WSIS phase I that was held in Geneva in December 2003, El Saadany acted as the main coordinator between the ITU (principle master of the summit) and MCIT.

Additionally, she was selected by the ITU to be one of the Telecom Forum Committee members, as well as to assist in the marketing for both ITU Telecom Africa 2008 held in Cairo, and ITU Telecom Asia 2008 held in Bangkok.

El Saadany’s international presence also includes playing an influential role in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meetings in Athens in 2006, Rio de Janeiro in 2007 and Hyderabad in 2008, as well as mastering the preparations for the fourth IGF meeting, held in Sharm Al Sheikh in November 2009.

El Saadany holds an MA in Economics from the American University in Cairo and a BA in Business Administration from the Sadat Academy in Cairo.