News

MENA Job Seekers Can Obtain Career Certificates & Scholarships From Google

For job seekers who only speak Arabic, Google has added 5 additional digital skills courses to help them acquire even more digital skills.

Published

5 years ago

August 21, 2021

Joanna Melki

Google

The tech industry has an insatiable appetite for skilled employees, and universities don’t produce nearly enough graduates to meet it. The result is a global talent shortage, which has recently reached a 15-year high, with 69% of employers globally struggling to find employees with the right blend of technical skills and human strengths.

Now, Google is offering to sponsor over 7,000 scholarships for its Career Certificates program in the Middle East and North Africa as part of the Grow Stronger with Google initiative.

The certificates included in the program are aimed at job seekers with no prior IT experience, and their goal is to help them cultivate the skills they need to find employment in the following four major fields: IT support, project management, UX design, and data analytics.

To reach a wide range of participants, several local organizations are helping to distribute the scholarships, including:

Amideast in Lebanon
Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) and the Higher College of Technology in the UAE
Egyptian Banking Institution (EBI) and the University Center for Career Development (UCCD)
Gaza Sky Geeks in Palestine
General Commission for Audiovisual Media (GCAM) and the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF) in Saudi Arabia
The Agency for Digital Development (ADD) in Morocco

Google’s certificates can be obtained even without a scholarship through self-paced programs on Coursera.org. It’s then up to individual employers to recognize them.

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For job seekers who only speak Arabic, Google has added five additional digital skills courses to Maharat min Google, helping them acquire even more digital skills needed to thrive in today’s digital world.

Google’s initiative is part of the global education trend of placing greater emphasis on practical skills and using modern digital tools to obtain them. This trend reflects the fact that traditional universities have limited capacity and have trouble keeping with the rapidly evolving needs of the tech industry.

News

Nano Banana 2 Arrives In MENA For Google Gemini Users

Google brings its latest image model to Gemini and Search, adding 4K output and tighter text control for regional users.

Published

2 weeks ago

February 27, 2026

Nour Nasir

Google

Google has opened access to Nano Banana 2 across the Middle East and North Africa, pushing its newest image model into everyday tools rather than keeping it inside the exclusive (and expensive) Pro tier.

The rollout spans the Google Gemini desktop and mobile apps, and extends to Google Search through Lens and AI Mode. Developers can also test it in preview via AI Studio and the Gemini API.

Nano Banana 2 runs on Gemini Flash, Google’s fast inference layer. The focus is speed, but also control. Users can export visuals from 512px up to 4K, adjusting aspect ratios for everything from vertical social posts to widescreen displays.

The model maintains character likeness across up to five figures and preserves fidelity for as many as 14 objects within a single workflow. This enables visual continuity across scenes, iterations, or edits — supporting projects like short films, storyboards, and multi-scene narratives. Text rendering has also been improved, delivering legible typography in mockups and greeting cards, with built-in translation and localization directly within images.

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Under the hood, the system taps Gemini’s broader knowledge base and pulls in real-time information and imagery from web search to render specific subjects more accurately. Lighting and fine detail have been upgraded, without slowing output.

By embedding the model inside Gemini and Search, Google is normalizing advanced image generation for a mass audience. In MENA, where startups and marketing teams are leaning heavily on AI to scale content across languages and borders, that shift lands at a practical moment.

The move also folds creative tooling deeper into search itself, so that image generation is no longer a separate workflow. It now sits right next to the query box.