Middle East Business
Doha takes the ninth World Investment Forum in October
By Staff Writer | 1 September 2026
Three days from 25 October, with infrastructure, energy and critical minerals among the tracks, and about twenty ministers already confirmed.
Doha will hold the ninth World Investment Forum from 25 to 27 October 2026. The forum is organised biennially by UN Trade and Development, which has run it since 2008 and describes it as convening participants from more than 160 countries, among them heads of state, ministers, chief executives, sovereign wealth fund executives and stock exchange leaders.
The theme is Investing in the Future. The organiser's stated intent is to look past short-term capital flows to long-term value creation, productive capacity and economic resilience, and to examine how investment and finance systems change in response to fragmentation, climate pressure and fast technological change.
What is on the programme
The published programme includes the Global Leaders Investment Summit, the Sustainable Stock Exchanges Global Dialogue and the Investment and Enterprise Ministerial Roundtable, with sessions on climate finance, digital transformation and inclusive growth. The tracks announced for the Doha edition cover artificial intelligence, infrastructure, energy, critical minerals, sustainable finance, tourism, culture and the space economy.
Preparation has been running through August. More than fifteen Qatari organisations have been signed up across the specialised tracks, and the organiser reports that a recent visit to Doha closed with more than eight high-level meetings to fix hosting and co-chairing roles for Qatari partners. Invest Qatar and the Qatar Investment Authority are named among the partners.
We have already confirmed attendance from approximately 20 government ministers and 20 heads of international organisations, including the Secretary-General of the ITU co-chairing our AI track and the Secretary-General of UN Tourism co-leading the tourism investment session.
Nan Li Collins, director of the division on investment and enterprise at UN Trade and Development
Why a construction reader should mark the date
Three of the announced tracks sit directly on the sector: infrastructure, energy and critical minerals. Forums of this kind are where the terms on which large schemes are financed get argued in public, and where the concession and offtake structures that later appear in tender documents are first described.
Infrastructure, energy and critical minerals are three of the announced tracks. That is the pipeline, discussed a year or two before it reaches a bill of quantities.
The second reason is timing. A three-day event of this size in late October, with twenty ministries represented, tends to be the occasion on which host-country announcements are cleared for release. Anyone tracking Qatari or wider Gulf project announcements should expect a cluster around that week rather than a steady flow.
What is still open
The venue, the detailed session list, participation terms and registration have not been published, and the organiser has said they will follow. No figure has been given for expected attendance at the Doha edition, and none is estimated here.