As prepared for delivery
Your Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar,
Excellency Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibeh, Prime Minister of Libya,
Excellency Mamitiana Rajaonarison, Prime Minister of Madagascar,
Excellency Samuel Ntsokoane Matekane, Prime Minister of Lesotho,
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
Welcome to the ninth World Investment Forum. On behalf of UNCTAD, I want to thank the Government and people of Qatar for their generous hospitality, in what has been a difficult year for this region. Doha first hosted this Forum in 2012, alongside the conference that gave us the Doha Mandate. We are honoured to return.
The theme of this conference is “Investing in the Future”. Every generation faces this question differently. What counts as a good investment, who makes it and where it goes – these have never been fixed. They reflect the economy of their time, and its projection into the future. And here we are seeing profound changes that demand our attention.
For decades, capital followed cost and efficiency. Countries competed on price, and many developing economies built their first industries that way. That era produced real gains. It also produced a set of assumptions – about how markets work, about what governments should and should not do – that shaped the rules we built together, including at forums like this one.
Those assumptions no longer hold. The market’s hand is no longer so invisible. Governments in every region now use subsidies, investment screening and trade policy to secure the industries they consider critical – artificial intelligence, semiconductors, clean energy, critical minerals. According to our data, these sectors draw nearly half of all new greenfield investment worldwide, up from one sixth just five years ago. Markets are no longer discovered; they are designed. We have entered a new age of investment: the age of strategy.
This age carries immense promise. It is accelerating the clean-energy transition, expanding digital infrastructure and creating new centres of production across the developing world – investors from this region are already part of that effort, across Africa and Asia.
But the opportunities of this age are not evenly distributed. Building a semiconductor facility or an AI data centre requires capital, talent, energy and institutions that many countries are still developing.
The least developed and lower-middle-income economies receive barely 10% of investment in strategic sectors – less than half their share in other industries. For a young engineer in those economies, this gap can decide whether the industries of this century offer her work at home.
Narrowing that gap is one of the purposes of this Forum. In another time, the work of multilateral forums was largely to remove obstacles – lower barriers and let capital find its way. In an age of strategy, the work is different. It is to help countries build strategies of their own, strengthen the institutions and skills that make investment productive and find the partners to carry those strategies forward.
Excellencies,
Qatar has opened its doors to the world this week, to heads of government, ministers, investment agencies, stock exchanges, investors and entrepreneurs. I hope we honour that hospitality with two days of good work, and with partnerships that last well beyond them.
I thank you.