In Conversation with His Excellency Mohamed Al Shorafa

Your excellency, thank you for speaking to us in this discussion and esteemed guests, welcome. Uh we have a very interesting conversation at hand. As you've heard from the panels and discussions earlier, the amount of people coming to the UAE, uh Dubai has surpassed four million. Abu Dhabi was already past 4 million and had 7.5% growth last year.

So the population is surging and of course with that comes pressure on infrastructure uh housing all the those things. Can you talk to us a bit about what your plan is to accommodate this in the years to come?

Well uh thank you for having me. I think uh we're in a beautiful place uh this morning. We have an amazing uh few days coming uh interacting with a lot of uh decision makers, mind thinkers and uh it's great to see uh people that uh haven't seen for a while. Um to look at the population growth in Abu Dhabi, we have to look at a lot of different components, especially infrastructure. And uh we are very glad that we had a a very good problem that we are trying to solve.

Now

our plans of uh Abu Dhabi to our urban plan of 2030 we were supposed to reach to a population of 2.4. Uh we are glad that in 2024 we reached that population. So this tells you there's a lot of uh growth that happened, a lot of influx of uh residents, investors, entrepreneurs that see a lot of opportunities in Abu Dhabi. And uh now we have planned that new 2040 urban plan to accommodate double that population

and to accommodate that we have to have a proper infrastructure. A lot of people think infrastructure is construction. But when you look at infrastructure, infrastructure touches a lot of different economic uh sectors. It it touches hospitality, healthcare, education, construction, transportation. So when the government actually pumps a lot of investment into infrastructure and developing these assets, there's a lot of uh multiplier effect that generates economic uh cycle in a lot of different sectors.

What Abu Dhabi have done is trying to invest now over 240 billion worth 240 billion dirhams worth of infrastructure projects in the next seven to to uh 10 years. And to do that, this cannot be done only by the government. And that's why we are involving the private sector in a lot of different programs to move as fast as possible because we believe the more infrastructure is there, the more we can actually generate more economic sustainability, economic growth and increase our resident exposure to Abu Dhabi's infrastructure. And also a a point of conversation today was in addition to expansion of infrastructure was also maintaining the quality of livability in Abola because that's something that has been attracting people to come here. Is that part of your strategy as well about the social benefit as well know when it comes to this infrastructure?

You've touched on a very important point and this uh point is really very close to our leadership in Abu Dhabi. Uh we developed a new strategy called livable and lovable. So again, it's not only the assets that we try to build. It's not the physical asset, but there's a lot of uh non-physical aspects and the quality of those assets and how can they be a contributor to nationals and residents, tourists that are coming to to Abu Dhabi. So we have to look at the complete journey of uh all the components of our population even blue collars.

Yeah, we are actually involved in every single district in Abu Dhabi. I'll give you a very simple program that we've just developed. It's the livability program. Uh a year and a half ago, we developed a livability program. We called it livability 1.

0. Beginning of uh 2026, we are introducing our 2.0 O program and this will include 120 different components of quality of services related to our infrastructure from education, from cycling tracks, from accessibility to healthcare, accessibility to social services, uh running uh how we can introduce more national uh topics to the population. We are considering the assets as as given from a physical point of view but it is very important that we try to develop all these infrastructure with the assistance of the private sector. The government of Abu Dhabi is a rich government.

It's not the matter that we are looking for financing but I think it's important to introduce private investment into our infrastructure as well. Let's talk about for example our uh smart city program. We started investing into smart city program for the last two and a half years. We developed our digital twin uh programs. We introduced autonomous vehicles.

Now you see them on on the streets for the last 6 months. uh and this was all because our leadership's push to introduce more technology in our livability programs and autonomous for example was introduced through the autonomous uh council headed by Shehdan and Muhammad bin Zed on on how we can uh generate more regulatory policies uh and trying to create us being a benchmark a lot of countries in the world in Western Europe, in North America, in Asia, they all have autonomous vehicles, but they are very stringent into policym and introducing new policies, especially in creating sandboxes for entrepreneurs to come and develop these technologies. We became an attractive uh city uh that introduces policies with safety in in uh as a priority but giving them the opportunity to come and showcase and introduce their uh technologies in in Abu Dhabi

and that's what I wanted to ask you about next because Abu Dhabi has risen five positions to become fifth in the IMD uh smart city index and I work you know with the national in yes and I remember seeing a a vehicle approaching pedestrians. I thought I was there was no one in the driver's seat. I thought I was going to have a hero moment and have to go stop a car, but then realizing there's someone in the back seat, you know, uh monitoring you this autonomous vehicle. So, with this being the future, and I think this is what you're talking about, right, in terms of you're not only talking about things happening now, but these investments are taking place, have output in the years to come. Can you describe when you're building a smart city how you're using AI and other technologies on the back end to be able to make all this cohesively work together from micromobility to autonomous vehicles and the like from municipality and transport point of view.

We have tons of data, really tons of data. And if you have the right data available for you and trying to develop a clear foundational platform that creates insights for not only policy makers and regulators, but also entrepreneurs to identify opportunities within the community, they can come up with a completely new different type of products that we believe are important for our smart city programs. That's one. two as you mentioned we've we've we've moved up five franks and we moved five franks in 12 months and this is incredible uh effort and this is not only the part of municipality transport because IMD uh takes the scores of healthare education uh transportation and this tells you that our leadership's northtop have already been uh implemented and being developed and IMD score is telling us yes you are on the right track and we start pushing a very a very important introduction was our uh green parks

Abu Dhabi in uh end of 24 and mid 25 we we introduced 220 green parks in Abu Dhabi communities in Abu Dhabi city Alen and Alafra uh area how are we doing this we are just everybody is working toward one single strategy From a transportation point of view, we started introducing technology within our current roads in getting uh vox uh data to the cars and the technologies to enable drivers

to understand where is the best way. It's not just putting a Google map and telling you where you need to go. No, it tells you uh data that can helps you not only plan but also understand where are the problems that you can avoid by not facing up. So I think Abu Dhabi as a government and you've I think you know this very well our T uh application has been uh renowned internationally and we use a lot of artificial intelligence into that and by doing that we are using AI in our urban planning identifying where is the right uh development needs to be what is the required transportation uh right of way or identifying where are the utilities that needs to be moved The faster we can introduce AI into our life, into our policym, into our regulatory framework makes our life easier. But again, the reflection is on the people that are living in Abu Dhabi.

Definitely. And you have a short amount of time left. So I'll wrap my last two questions into one. Can you talk about as well when you're introducing all this AI, all this infrastructure? We had Adipek, you know, a month back and talking about, you know, power is knowledge, meaning that you need energy to power all of this.

The sustainable impact of of this is going to be immense over the years. Sustainable in terms of impacted on sewage, on transport to to maintain that livability and also to do all of this a lot of capital is needed. So how are you is this part of your strategy to look at the sustainability aspect to uh and also to attract the right type of capital to maintain this momentum?

See, I'll be honest with you. We've been seeing a lot of uh um uh interest from a lot of private equity companies, from pension funds that see Abu Dhabi as a great opportunity for their long-term uh returns because they understand that the credit rating of Abu Dhabi government is one of the top. Uh number three, they understand that we are developing what is needed for the future, not only what's needed now because we are trying to plan for what needs to come and that this is an an ongoing uh exercise that we keep always our eye on the board and our northstar. Uh but the most important thing is that we see our real estate sector is picking up tremendously. uh prices are going up and that's why now we are also trying to control uh pricing.

Yeah.

Uh and we see a lot of uh attraction from uh international real estate development companies not only our uh current UAE national real estate companies and this tells you that there's a lot of uh interest in Abu Dhabi. There's a lot of not only interest from an investment but also an interest from people moving and moving their families, their businesses, people that they want to work, live and actually retire in in in this part of the world. And we are not trying to compete with anybody. I think Abu Dhabi has its own uh natural uh consistent approach uh from a livability uh point of view. The key to all of this is how we are connecting all of these projects and developments around.

But again how Abu Dhabi is trying to attract private investment in to come and develop these infrastructure uh projects is very important that we are all working together by either from Abu Dhabi investment office or uh department of economic development even department of municipality attracting investors that we see that can add value it's not only about the money it's about adding value to what we are trying to do again livable and lovable definitely And we have 30 seconds left, but maybe looking at the bigger picture as well. When looking at what all this investment is doing to the greater picture of Abu Dhabi and the UEE in terms of economic uh diversification, can you talk about which sectors are the key ones that you think with the investments you're making will contribute to?

As I told you at the beginning, I think the introduction of infrastructure projects, it touches a lot of sectors, but the most important ones obviously construction and manufacturing. We see a lot of manufacturing companies setting up in Abu Dhabi uh because of the the magnitude of infrastructure projects that are coming. We saw a lot of uh new construction companies coming and setting up in Abu Dhabi and we've eased out a lot of the regulations to make it much easier for those construction companies to come and set up shop uh in in in Abu Dhabi. um uh transportation sector is becoming a very important contributor to our definitely uh GDP especially when we start introducing infrastructure projects in Abu Dhabi. It touches a lot of so it's it's it's it's not only ever one specific.

Correct.

Absolutely. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much for your time. We're out of time, but uh there's so much more to ask, but uh wish you the best of luck and uh doing amazing work.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you.