Faisal Alshimmari, Head of ESG, represented Mashreq at the WUF13 Business Roundtable, part of the World Urban Forum convened by UN-Habitat, held in Baku, Azerbaijan on 20 May 2026.
The broader WUF13 theme this year was Housing the world: Safe and resilient cities and communities, while the Business Roundtable focused on adequate housing for all through the lens of long-term capital deployment, asset resilience, and delivery risk.
During the discussion, Faisal highlighted the need to evolve sustainable finance frameworks to better recognise affordable housing as a core sustainability outcome. He also articulated the current gap in having a well-defined ESG taxonomy that fully integrates social outcomes and specifically addresses affordable housing, noting that greater regulatory clarity is required to unlock private capital at scale. Faisal emphasized that housing should be viewed as integral to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 1, SDG 8, SDG 10, and SDG 11, and highlighted the importance of practical policy and market enablers to accelerate capital flows into the sector. He suggested that these could include targeted incentives such as lower IBOR-linked financing costs, tax rebates, and selective waiver of taxes or fees, similar to support mechanisms seen in the UAE national housing programmes, to improve project viability, reduce delivery risk, and make affordable housing more investable for long-term private capital.
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