This week, Canada convenes one of the most ambitious investment matchmaking exercises any government has attempted. Prime Minister Mark Carney has invited the world's largest asset managers, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds — institutions responsible for well over $100 trillion in assets — to spend two days in Toronto reviewing pitches for more than 160 projects across energy, mining, defence manufacturing and power generation. Behind it sits a target of roughly C$1 trillion in investment over five years, and a broader aim of making the Canadian economy less dependent on a single trading partner.
Officials have described the exercise plainly: it is matchmaking. Projects that need capital, in a room with capital that needs projects.
Every investment promotion agency in the world recognises this exercise, because almost every one of them runs a version of it. The Gulf alone hosts a dense calendar of investment forums; Oman convenes the Duqm Economic Forum, Saudi Arabia the Future Investment Initiative, and Egypt, Morocco and others stage their own. The format is familiar: a prospectus, a venue, two days of meetings, a communiqué.
The format works. It is also, structurally, the least efficient part of the process it serves — and understanding why points to what the next generation of investment promotion should look like.
What the summit model does well
Convening power is real, and software cannot replicate it. A head of government issuing invitations produces a room that no platform can assemble. Senior people attend because the political signal matters, and because two days of concentrated meetings is efficient for institutions whose scarcest resource is attention.
Summits also create a deadline. Governments prepare, sponsors sharpen their materials, ministries resolve questions that had been drifting for months. A forcing function is worth a great deal in economies where decisions otherwise diffuse across agencies.
And summits build relationships, which remain the substrate of institutional investment. A sovereign fund does not commit to a jurisdiction it has never met.
None of that is in question. The problem is what surrounds the two days.
Four structural gaps
The prospectus is a snapshot of a moving target. A document listing 160 projects is prepared once, distributed to invitees, and begins ageing immediately. Permits advance. Offtake agreements are signed or fall away. Costs move. An investor reading it three weeks later cannot know which parts are still true, and has no way to filter it against their own mandate. Institutions do not invest from brochures; they invest from diligence — and the brochure is where diligence starts again from zero.
Matching is relationship-driven rather than systematic. No organising team can rigorously assess 160 projects against the specific mandates — asset class, ticket size, instrument, risk tolerance, horizon — of dozens of institutions in the time available. So schedules get built on familiarity and seniority. The result is predictable: well-connected sponsors meet investors whose mandates they do not fit, while a project that precisely matches an infrastructure fund's criteria never reaches its analyst, because nobody made the connection.
The event ends. Investors fly home. Projects that were not quite ready, or whose champion did not secure the right meeting, go dark. The pipeline that existed for forty-eight hours dissolves, and reassembling it means waiting for next year's forum. Investment decisions, meanwhile, take twelve to thirty-six months. The infrastructure supporting them exists for two days.
Almost nothing is measured. Ask most agencies what a forum produced and the answer arrives in attendance figures and the headline value of memoranda signed. Ask which projects reached diligence, which reached term sheets, which closed — and, most valuable of all, why the others did not — and the answer is usually unavailable. Not because agencies are careless, but because nobody built the system that would record it. Without that record, the next forum repeats the same errors under a new banner.
The year-round layer
The conclusion is not that summits should be replaced. It is that they are the visible peak of a process that needs to exist continuously.
Investors do not deploy capital according to a host country's events calendar. An infrastructure fund with a mandate for emerging-market logistics assets is screening opportunities every week of the year. When that fund is ready to look, the relevant question is whether the jurisdiction's projects are discoverable, structured comparably, and supported by evidence a diligence team can actually use — not whether a forum happens to be scheduled.
For an agency, the practical consequence is straightforward. A forum agenda accommodates perhaps fifteen or twenty projects. The pipeline behind it usually holds several times that number, and the projects that do not make the agenda are not unattractive — they are simply not scheduled. Publishing that wider pipeline in a structured, evidence-backed form means the projects that missed the room remain discoverable by the funds whose mandates they fit, during the months when those funds are actually screening. It also means the projects that did make the room stay live long after the delegates have gone home.
That requires a shared standard. Projects described against a common schema — sector, capital sought, instrument, stage, offtake status, permit status, land status, sponsor track record, and crucially what is still missing. Maturity stated honestly, so a concept is never presented as though it were a financeable project. Investor mandates captured structurally, so matching can be done systematically and explained. Evidence attached to every material figure, with its source and its date.
Do that, and the summit changes character.
It stops being the place where investors discover projects and becomes the place where they discuss projects they have already screened.
Meetings begin at the second question rather than the first. Sponsors meet institutions whose mandates genuinely fit. The two days are spent on judgment, relationships and negotiation — the things that actually require people in a room — rather than on orientation.
And when the delegates leave, the pipeline does not.
This is the layer CityCalc was built for, and it is complementary to the forum rather than a substitute for it. Governments keep the convening power, the political signal and the relationships. What changes is that the infrastructure around those two days stops being disposable: an evidence-graded, continuously maintained record of markets, projects and opportunities, where every figure carries its source and its date, and where maturity is labelled rather than implied.
What agencies should measure
The discipline that follows is uncomfortable but clarifying. An agency running this layer can answer, twelve months after a forum, questions most cannot currently answer at all.
How many projects reached investor diligence? How many reached term sheets? How much capital was committed, and how much was actually deployed? Which investor mandates went repeatedly unmatched — and does that reveal a gap in the pipeline, or a gap in what the jurisdiction offers? Among projects that attracted no interest, what were the stated reasons?
That last question is the most valuable and the least asked. Reasons for failure aggregate into something no consultant's report can substitute for: an evidence-based account of why capital is not arriving.
The harder question underneath
Which leads to the point most easily lost in summit season.
A report from Royal Bank of Canada, published alongside this week's gathering, observed that Canada attracts close to 4% of global inward foreign direct investment while representing about 2% of global output — a creditable share, but one the bank judged below the country's potential given its resources, workforce and power costs. The constraints it identified were not promotional. They were structural: an opaque and shifting regulatory system that lengthens timelines and raises the cost of capital. Canadian mining projects, the report noted, average over twenty years from discovery to production, against roughly thirteen in Australia. Regulatory delay and uncertainty contributed to the cancellation of eight proposed liquefied natural gas projects.
No summit fixes a seven-year permitting gap.
This is the diagnostic question every investment agency should ask before committing a budget to the next forum: is the problem that investors do not know about us, that they consider us and choose elsewhere, or that they choose us and then cannot execute? Those are three entirely different problems with three entirely different remedies, and only one of them is solved by a room full of institutions.
Agencies that can answer that question — with evidence drawn from their own pipeline rather than from assertion — will allocate their attraction budgets far better than those that cannot. Summits will still matter. They will simply stop being asked to do work they were never designed to do.
Blakeford Advisory works with governments, investment promotion agencies and development institutions on investment attraction strategy and execution. CityCalc provides evidence-graded market, location and opportunity intelligence across the Middle East and North Africa.
Related articles
- Saudi startup RIME raises over $2 million Seed round — Saudi AI startup RIME has raised more than $2 million in a Seed funding round led by SEEDRA Ventures, with participation from Athla Investme
- Saudi AI firm MOZN secures strategic investment from HUMAIN — Saudi Arabia-based enterprise AI startup MOZN has secured a strategic investment from HUMAIN, along with a partnership to develop sovereign
- Longevium to open AI-powered longevity research lab in Dubai after $7 million raise — UAE-based longevity healthtech company Longevium has raised $7 million in its first funding round to establish an AI-powered Longevity Resea
- Beltone Venture Capital exits BirdNest investment with 3.5x return — Egypt-based Beltone Venture Capital has completed a partial exit from Egyptian proptech BirdNest, generating a 3.5x return on invested capit
- MENA startups raise $173 million in July 2026 as Saudi Arabia regains the lead — MENA startup funding rose modestly in July 2026, but the rebound was largely debt-driven, with equity investment remaining subdued. Startups