Boardrooms across the Arab and North African countries that reflect the societies, and the living systems, they serve, and help build economies that are inclusive, resilient and made to last.

Three years ago climate sat in the disclosure column, geopolitics was predictable enough to build an 18-month plan, and AI was a line in the IT budget, none of which describes the conditions a board now governs in. What replaced that settlement does not arrive in sequence. Instability, geopolitical fracture, technological acceleration and ecosystem unraveling compound one another. The ecological, social and financial systems directors oversee are interconnected, with systemic shocks cascading.

The frameworks most directors inherited assume a baseline of stability that is no longer there. What is required is the ability to hold complexity without flattening it into a slide, and the discernment to act with incomplete information.

We launched Diversity on Board in 2019 as a regional platform connecting high-achieving Arab and North African talent with board opportunities, from a simple observation that the composition of a board provides the multiperspectivity required for long-term value creation.

Two years later we launched the Emerging Board Leaders Fellowship, powered by HSBC Middle East with KPMG Bahrain as knowledge partner, to prepare directors with future literacy needed for the next frontier of fiduciary duty.

In 2025 we began widening what diversity on board means. Through Nature on Board we began convening interspecies board simulations across the region, where directors stepped into the perspectives of mangroves, migratory birds and coral reefs. They found that when you give nature a voice in strategic decisions, the quality of those decisions changes.