Landmark Hotel

Who holds the authority to define success in this region: the funder, the measurement framework, the community, or the entrepreneur? Most tools used to measure and validate impact in the Arab world were designed elsewhere, for different communities, with different assumptions about what a good outcome looks like. This panel argues that who defines success is itself a political question, and one that Arab practitioners are increasingly refusing to leave unanswered. Panelists move through three tensions: the language problem, the framework problem, and the knowledge production problem; speaking from direct experience, not theory. The session closes with a concrete output: a set of impact principles reflecting what impact means on Arab terms, to be applied, not studied.​

Landmark Hotel

The Arab impact ecosystem has no shortage of external partners, but partnership alone is not enough. This panel examines what it takes to move beyond resource exchange and toward genuine solidarity: relationships where Arab-led priorities set the agenda, where values travel alongside capital, and where collective efforts are mobilized in service of an impact ecosystem built from within the region. Practitioners get honest about what that shift demands, where it is already happening, and what it means to show up as a true peer.​

Landmark Hotel

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

The impact ecosystem is more crowded and more confused than ever. Philanthropists, development finance institutions, impact funds, traditional VCs, and NGOs are all increasingly operating in overlapping spaces, using overlapping language, and sometimes competing for the same deals or the same founders' attention. Yet the instruments they deploy, the returns they require, and the accountability structures they operate under are fundamentally different. This panel brings the full spectrum into the same room and asks the question that rarely gets asked out loud: who should be doing what, and are we each actually doing it? The goal is not consensus. It is productive friction and enough honesty that founders, LPs, and ecosystem builders in the audience leave with a clearer map of who to approach, when, and with what expectations.​

Landmark Hotel

International donors have shaped much of how funding reaches the Arab impact ecosystem, and their institutions are now recalculating what comes next — shifting mandates, tighter budgets, and open questions about whether the traditional donor–recipient model still holds. Hosted by RDPP, this session puts that recalculation on the record. Donor representatives speak candidly about how they see the next decade of engagement with the region's social impact sector, and what they expect from Arab partners in return.​

Landmark Hotel

Numbers tell you what happened. Stories tell you why it mattered. This workshop examines how social enterprises in the Arab world communicate impact in ways that are authentic, human, and rooted in the communities they serve — without flattening complexity or performing for donor expectations. Participants work through the tensions between what funders want to hear and what communities actually experienced. Each participant leaves with a sharper framework for how their organisation tells its own story on their own terms.​

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A conversation across generations about circular economies that ran on trust and seasonality, about communities that took care of their own long before anyone called it social impact, and about what it means to do that work today in a region that has been told, for too long, that it needs to learn these things from elsewhere.​