This is not a chronological agenda. Sessions are grouped by what they are designed to produce, and every one of them names its artefact before it enters the programme.
Leadership, skills and human capital
How young people move between markets, build careers across borders, and carry skills that transfer. Credential portability, mentorship structures and education pathways that survive contact with reality.
Collaboration Lab · Future of Work
Entrepreneurship, investment and economic opportunity
The commercial corridor already exists. This pillar concerns who gets to use it — how a founder in Nairobi or Accra actually structures, licenses, finances and lands a business in the Gulf, and the reverse.
Collaboration Lab · Cross-Border Entrepreneurship
Technology, AI, creativity and new economies
Where the tooling, the data, the talent and the deployment capacity sit — and how they are combined. African innovation is not waiting for permission; the question is what compounds when it meets Gulf infrastructure.
Collaboration Lab · AI & African Innovation
Community, sustainability and shared futures
Cities, climate, culture and the institutions young people will inherit and run. Responsible leadership treated as a practice with outputs, not a value stated in a programme note.
Collaboration Lab · Sustainable Cities & Climate
The full session-by-session timetable publishes once speakers are confirmed and the programme is locked in October 2026.
Two voices, one from each region, on a question neither can answer alone.
40 minutes · plenary
Senior practitioners in structured exchange with emerging leaders who have prepared.
60 minutes · plenary
The signature mechanism. Teams of 10–12 working a real challenge to a named next step.
2 × 90 minutes · breakout
Structured pairing sessions. Pairings are tracked and measured at 90 days.
90 minutes · matched
Ventures and research demonstrated to an audience able to act on what they see.
Rolling · exhibition
Scheduled bilaterals between founders, investors, corporates and market-access partners.
20-minute slots · matched
Programme built with creative practitioners from both regions, not decoration around the edges.
Evening · open
Institutional principals working the commitments that become the Dubai Commitment.
By invitation
Publishing your own constraints is a credibility signal. These are the rules the programme committee applies, and they are the reason sessions get cut.
Teams of 10–12 with enforced cross-regional and cross-sector composition, one institutional mentor and one facilitator each, across two working sessions. No Lab team is single-country.
01
A real, named problem brought by an institution or a participant — not a hypothetical.
02
Teams of 10–12, cross-regional and cross-sector by design. No team is single-country.
03
One institutional mentor, one facilitator, two working sessions across days one and two.
04
A pathway that can survive the flight home, with a named owner attached to it.
05
The institution or individual who carries it forward, identified in the room.
06
Fed directly into the Dubai Commitment and tracked publicly at 90, 180 and 365 days.
Cross-border talent, remote enterprise and credential portability between the two regions.
Tooling, data, talent and deployment — what it takes to build and ship from the continent.
Market entry, corporate structuring, capital and licensing across the UAE–Africa corridor.
Technology, finance and delivery for urban and climate infrastructure in both regions.
Intellectual property, distribution and export for creative enterprises working across regions.
Skills, mobility and institutional partnership between universities and employers.
Participants receive their Lab assignment and challenge brief before travel, so nobody arrives cold. Bilateral scheduling opens ahead of the Forum and participants land in Dubai with meetings already in the calendar.
