It has been more than a decade since Bahrain’s Shura Council, the state’s main legislative body, first granted its approval for a compulsory health insurance system. The proposal came at a time when governments across the region were attempting to shift the increasingly costly burden of health care provision towards the private sector. After its 2005 acceptance by the council, the government’s…
With significant expansion projects in both aluminium and power generation slated for between 2017 and 2020, Bahrain is investing in a new liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal that will offer these gas-intensive enterprises greater security of feedstock supply. Although domestic production of natural and associated gas increased by some 3.2% in 2015, imports will enable more rapid expansion…
In May 2016 nogaholding, the investment arm of the National Oil and Gas Authority (NOGA), signed a $570m credit agreement allowing it to move ahead with a $5bn overhaul of the country’s existing refining facility. This move would boost output capacity to 360,000 barrels per day (bpd), up from the 276,676 bpd produced in 2015. Bids were submitted in October 2016 for the engineering, procurement…
Thousands of Bahraini citizens are set to move into new properties in 2017 as the government makes good on its pledge to provide 25,000 new homes by the end of 2018. The houses and flats have been funded through the Ministry of Housing (MoH), the Gulf Development Fund and through public-private partnership (PPPs) agreements. The homes are built to an agreed specification and then handed to…
Being a short distance from more populous nations means Bahrain’s retail sector is strongly linked to tourism, with many visitors coming to the kingdom for the express purpose of shopping. Around 11m people drive across the King Fahd Causeway between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain every year, and according to a tourism survey for the third quarter of 2015, shopping was the main purpose of visiting…
Bahrain has a new tourism strategy as of 2016, together with a new tourism identity, to build greater awareness of the country as a travel destination. The strategy aims to see tourism revenue increase to $1bn annually by 2020, up from around $700m in 2015. This would almost double the contribution of the sector to GDP from about 3.6% in 2015 to 6.6% for 2020. The strategy also names specific…
A new light rail service could help travellers avoid heavy traffic and turn the journey from Bahrain’s new airport to The Avenues shopping centre into a stress-free shuttle ride. Transport planners are going back to the drawing board to breathe new life into a mass transit proposal for 2020 that was first tabled in 2010. RAIL REVISITED: The Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications (MTT)…
Although it is not apparent to passengers landing at the existing terminal, building work on Bahrain’s Airport Modernisation Programme (AMP) is well under way. The project is one of the key individual recipients of finance from the Gulf Development Fund (GDF), through which $10bn is being channelled into Bahrain. The investment will allow the single-runway airport to increase annual passenger…
As part of the kingdom’s attempts to grow into a regional education centre as well as expand into being a more knowledge-based economy, a strong emphasis has been placed on raising the quality of tuition on offer. So far, this role has been filled by the Education & Training Quality Authority, which has carried out reviews and follow-up reports of 79 academic programmes at the country’s…
In 2016 the University of Salford became the first British higher education institution to partner with the government of Bahrain, when it announced that it would begin offering degrees through a new campus in Janabiyah. The university expects to enrol its first 100 students in September 2017. Meanwhile, Bahrain’s Applied Science University (ASU) announced in December 2015 that it is set…
