Re-affirming its support for education as a vehicle for socio-economic advancement, Dubai Aluminium Company Limited (“DUBAL”) is once again offering handsome cash prizes to students participating in the 2007/2008 DUBAL Educational Award competition. A total of AED 100,000 is up for grabs.
The initiative, the second of its kind, follows on the success of the inaugural DUBAL Educational Award held in the 2006/2007 academic year. The concept is in keeping with the directive issued by HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai, UAE Minister of Finance and Industry, and Chairman of DUBAL for corporate organisations to help schools provide their students with research-based learning opportunities.
Khalid Buhumaid, General Manager: Corporate Relations and International Affairs, and the official spokesperson of DUBAL advises that the competition is closely linked to schools’ visits to the aluminium giant’s smelter complex in Jebel Ali. “We encourage educational excursions to our facilities, generally entertaining at least 44 schools during the course of the academic year,” says Buhumaid. “During these visits, we inform the students and their teachers about our company by providing relevant facts and statistics. The DUBAL Educational Award requires that the students write an article or create an artwork using a medium of their choice – whether drawing, painting, sculpting, modelling or any other creative medium – within two weeks of their visit. The best entries per school, as nominated by their respective activities sections, are then entered into the DUBAL Educational Award competition, for adjudication by an panel of judges that includes representatives of DUBAL and the Ministry of Education’s Cultural and Artistic Activities Department.”
The theme chosen for the 2007/2008 competition is “DUBAL and the Environment”. With this in mind, the school visit programme for the year ahead will comprise a showing of an educational film on DUBAL, a presentation by an open discussion sessions, and a plant tour conducted by volunteers from within the organisation. The competition gets underway at the end of October, coincident with the start of the first schools’ visits for the year.
“We are excited about this year’s competition as it promises to be bigger and better than last year’s,” says Buhumaid. “Given that we expect to host at least 1,320 students, it also provides a powerful platform for raising awareness of DUBAL while expressing our company’s genuine interest in education in a meaningful way.”
About Dubai Aluminium Company – DUBAL
DUBAL is ranked as the seventh largest producer of primary aluminium in the world, and currently ranks as the largest single-site aluminium smelter complex in the Western world and is also the single largest non-oil contributor to the economy of Dubai. Built on a 480-hectare site in Jebel Ali, Dubai, UAE, DUBAL’s major facilities comprise an 883,000 mtpa primary aluminium smelter, a 1,983 megawatt power station, a large carbon plant, three casthouses, a 30-million-gallon-per-day water desalination plant, laboratories, port and storage facilities.
The company has the capacity to produce more than 900,000 metric tonnes of high quality finished aluminium products a year, in three main forms: foundry alloy for automotive applications, extrusion billet for construction purposes and high purity aluminium for the electronics industry. A dynamic growth strategy will increase annual production volumes of metal to almost one million metric tonnes by 2008.
DUBAL serves 280 customers in 44 countries predominantly in the Far East, Europe, the ASEAN region, the Middle East and Mediterranean region, and North America. The company holds ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification; and has twice won the Dubai Quality Award in the Production and Manufacturing sector (1996 and 2000).
