Jordan is raising the level of its preparations for the upcoming Jordan European Investment Conference with a clear vision, presenting a portfolio of investment opportunities worth close to 15 billion dollars, distributed across specific sectors, and projects whose feasibility, financing, and implementation mechanisms can be discussed.
اضافة اعلان
The conference, scheduled to be held at the Dead Sea on the 19th of next November under royal patronage, comes within the framework of the strategic and comprehensive partnership between Jordan and the European Union. The European Commission itself presents the conference as a platform for translating this partnership into concrete investment projects, bringing together investors, companies, financial institutions, and decision makers from both sides.
The Jordanian European relationship has remained strong for decades, politically, developmentally, and commercially, but today's challenge lies in expanding this relationship and adding long term direct investment to it.
One of the most important shifts observable in Jordan's preparation for the conference is the move from marketing the "investment environment" in general terms, to marketing clear investment opportunities. There are specific projects, with their costs, locations, the nature of the investment required, expected returns, financing model, legal framework, and implementation timeline.
The importance of what the government is doing today lies in gathering the projects, organizing and classifying these opportunities, and raising their level of investment readiness. This is a process that began well before the conference, through listing opportunities on the "Invest in Jordan" platform, preparing studies and terms of reference for some strategic projects, and working to raise the readiness of public private partnership projects on the technical, financial, and legal fronts.
Looking at the distribution of the investment opportunities on offer reveals another important aspect. Jordan is not only seeking capital to enter consumer or fast return commercial sectors, but is offering a large portion of the portfolio in core economic infrastructure. There are projects worth roughly 7 billion dollars in energy and mining, about 3.5 billion dollars in transport and railways, 1.61 billion dollars in logistics services, more than a billion dollars in tourism, and projects in water, industry, and the circular economy, sectors that carry a multiplied effect on the economy.
Investments of this kind can lower transport costs, raise the efficiency of goods movement, and strengthen the competitiveness of industry and mining, while also opening new avenues for industries and technologies linked to energy. In logistics services, they raise Jordan's ability to benefit from its location, especially amid the shifts underway in the region and the potential growth in trade movement and reconstruction in the coming years.
Jordan certainly needs capital, but alongside it needs technology, managerial expertise, knowledge, and access to global markets and supply chains, which gives partnership with European companies added value if well designed. Some projects should therefore include partnerships with the Jordanian private sector, transfer of knowledge and technology, and training of local labor.
This idea is already appearing in the preparatory activities for the conference, as Jordanian meetings with European companies have focused on projects that combine commercial feasibility with knowledge transfer, increased exports, and the creation of quality jobs, and on building partnerships between Jordanian and European companies rather than settling for a mere investor to government project relationship.
The Jordanian economy needs, in the coming years, higher rates of investment that enable it to expand its productive base and generate job opportunities, and it is difficult to achieve this relying on government spending alone, which makes attracting private capital, both domestic and foreign, an essential part of the growth equation.
The start appears to be heading in the right direction, with the state possessing a clear portfolio specifying sectors, projects, and costs, and taking it directly to European investors and financing institutions, marking an additional step from promoting investment to managing investment.
Jordan needs to make this conference a starting point for a path extending over years, and to convert a meaningful share of this portfolio into real projects on the ground, so that its impact appears in growth, employment, and export figures, in infrastructure and productivity, and in the Jordanian economy's own ability to move to a higher level of activity and competitiveness.
