About Haitham Al Rawahi

Something shifts in how you see the world when you live through an entire technological revolution — from your first internet connection, to carrying the world in your pocket, to having a conversation with an AI that understands context. These are the kind of experiences that don't just pass by — they fundamentally reshape how someone thinks about technology, business, and the digital economy.

I've lived through every era of these shifts — they weren't just events that happened around us, they shaped how we think about and see the digital economy. From my early experiences with the internet, to building in the digital space, to working on national-level policies and regulations, the journey has carried experiences in understanding the digital economy at both the global and local levels from multiple angles — experiences that gave me a deeper and broader understanding of how the digital world works and where it's heading.

I've been fortunate to experience that economy from three different angles: as a consumer navigating digital products and services daily, as an entrepreneur building in this space, and playing a key role in a regulatory team during a previous chapter of my career, where I contributed to issuing Oman's "E-Commerce Regulatory Framework" alongside the "Regulation for Marketing and Promotion Activities on Websites and Social Media Platforms". Seeing the landscape from these three sides gave the experience a different dimension, and a broader understanding of both the complexity and the opportunity in the digital economy.

On the international front, I worked with organizations like UNCTAD and WTO, and through a work environment that had direct collaboration with the World Economic Forum, I gained insight into how countries are ranked on global indices and what it actually takes to move up. That experience built a bridge between the local and global perspective, and led me into deep research on the global digital economy and how it connects to Oman's landscape.

This research and engaging with many key players locally confirmed what is already clear: the government is doing its part as a facilitator and enabler — real initiatives and genuine support for the private sector — and society carries the other half of the weight in building the digital economy. It's not enough to only talk about what the government should do. We need to direct the conversation toward what we can do as a digital community, start asking ourselves the right questions, and in short, actually start building what we see is missing in this economic ecosystem. Field studies grounded in our reality, tangible experiments, a stronger push toward building open-source software, and smaller events and communities that shape the future of Oman's digital economy.

This blog is my first step — a space to document what I learn and experiment with in the digital economy, Arabic content for the Arab world broadly and sometimes with a closer lens on Oman. Because what we're truly missing isn't ideas — it's documented work and open experiments that move us all forward.