Landmark Hotel | Main Stage

Impact is not something that the region adopted – it is what holds the region together.​ The endowment that has kept a school open for four hundred years. The land held in common and worked by everyone who lives from it. The fund that moves between neighbours each month, without a bank, without a contract, on nothing but the certainty that it will come back around. The obligation to show up when a family needs you, not as charity, but because that is what you are for.​ None of this was borrowed and much of it is still running, in villages and neighbourhoods across this region, entirely outside anything the sector would recognise as a framework.​ We open with a conversation across generations, between those who have followed these traditions through the record and those who live inside them. Not to recover something lost, but to say clearly what is already ours: that care, reciprocity and stewardship are not imported practices we are learning to apply but they are the fabric we are made of. The work ahead is to honour that, and to restore it where it has been worn away or forgotten.​

Landmark Hotel | Main Stage

Most tools used to measure and validate impact here were built elsewhere, for different communities, with different assumptions about what a good outcome looks like. Definitions of success are never neutral as they carry a view of who benefits, who decides, and what is worth counting. This panel asks what it would take for those definitions to be set here.​

Speakers

Suha Abdul Rahim Co-Director, Alfanar Venture Philanthropy

Lama Amr Executive Director, BuildPalestine

Mohamed Dhaouafi CEO, Cure Bionics

Khulood Hindiyeh Social Impact Consultant

Batool Hassan Executive Director, Meem Foundation

Landmark Hotel

Philanthropists, development finance institutions, impact funds, traditional VCs and NGOs increasingly operate in the same spaces, use the same language, and sometimes compete for the same deals — yet the instruments they deploy and the accountability they answer to are fundamentally different. This panel brings the full spectrum into one room to ask what rarely gets asked out loud: who should be doing what, and are we each actually doing it?​

Speakers

Nafez Dakkak Managing Partner, Anara Impact Capital

Rasha Manna Partner, F6 Ventures

Landmark Hotel | Main Stage

Sudan, Syria, Palestine and Lebanon have each put the same question to the impact ecosystem, at different times and for different reasons: what it takes to keep operating when crisis is an ongoing condition rather than a single event. This session moves past the language of resilience and into the specific decisions made under pressure.​

Speakers

Anam Raheem Communications & Gaza Response Lead, BuildPalestine

Hanady Abdalla Operations Manager, 249Startups

Mariam Al Jaajaa General Manager, Arab Group for the Protection of Nature

Ahmad Sufian Bayram Founder, Startup Syria

Landmark Hotel | Main Stage

The Arab impact ecosystem has no shortage of external partners, but partnership alone is not enough. This panel examines and highlights examples of partnerships that are rooted in trust, solidarity and shared values: relationships where priorities set the agenda, and where partnerships are based on mutual value and outcomes. Practitioners get honest about what is required to enable this and what it means to show up as a true peer.​

Speakers

Samar Dudin Regional Director & Head of Programs, Ruwwad Al Tanmiya

Mary Nazzal Social Entrepreneur & Founder, Amman Landmark Hotel

Alexandre Salha President, Lebanese Social Enterprise Association

Landmark Hotel | Main Stage

A working case study, not a success story. The session uses Egypt's Bab Amal programme as an evidence anchor — examining how cost-efficiency and adaptive design were built into the model from the start, how it was tested against evidence, and what it would take to replicate or adapt it across other Arab contexts. The conversation is technical: what are the actual mechanisms of cost-efficiency, and what do they require of funders, implementers, and communities on the ground?​

Landmark Hotel | Executive Hall | Invitation Only

Donor mandates across the region are shifting, and the institutions that set them are being asked, in public, what comes next: what they can still commit to, what they can no longer guarantee, and what they now expect of Arab partners in return.​ The harder question sits underneath. Does the donor-recipient model still hold, or has sovereignty over the agenda already moved elsewhere? And as traditional aid tightens, where does private capital and blended finance actually fit into what replaces it — not as a substitute, but as a different kind of counterpart this Summit is built to examine.​

Landmark Hotel | Executive Lounge

This interactive workshop invites participants to think more broadly about the resources they need to achieve their goals, and how they can build a more diverse and sustainable mix of those resources.​ Participants will start by mapping the resources they currently rely on, then look beyond funding and revenue to consider skills and expertise, time, in-kind contributions, partnerships, networks, spaces, technology, and other available assets. Through practical exercises, they will identify new resources they could access or mobilize and assess which are most relevant to their needs and goals.​ The aim is not to pursue as many resources as possible, but to build an intentional mix that reduces dependency, makes better use of what is available, and strengthens the organization or enterprise’s ability to sustain its work and impact.​