Projects

Project name
Makkah Economic Region Study

Client
Municipality of Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Rapid population growth, greater openness to a globalising economy and a decline in the proportion of employment and wealth that can be sustainably provided by the oil sector or government are creating the need for a diversified economy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its component regions, which can generate sustainable, high value employment for a large proportion of the adult population.

Happold Consulting has been assigned to prepare an economic development strategy for the Makkah region. The objectives of this strategy are to enhance and ensure sustainable economic growth and employment generation across the region. This strategy has beendeveloped with four major components:

• Defining an economic development model for the region based on analysis of successful precedents around the world, and on Makkah’s place in the regional, national and global contexts

• Outlining a sectoral development approach that identifies and prioritizes sectors to be established and promoted in the region. This would be based on maximizing the direct and indirect economic and employment benefits to the region. The approach blends a nodal cluster development strategy that provides the ecosystem for competitive advantage in specific sectors to a big bang strategy that endeavours to capture as much of the indirect benefits from the nodal sectors as possible within the region by promoting forward and backward linkages with other industries in the region.

• Outlining a regional development approach that identifies infrastructure and transport corridors linking major nodes such as Jeddah, Makkah and Rabigh in the region to each other and to national centres such as Riyadh and Dammam, and creating a hub and spoke model that creates economic and infrastructure links from the smaller settlements to the major nodes

• Identifying supporting interventions that are needed to ensure success of strategy to disseminate its benefits as widely as possible, such as improvements in education and skills development, promotion of small and medium enterprises and integration of women into the workforce.

Currently, Happold Consulting is working on Phase II of this project, where we are developing an implementation mechanism for the strategy including designing an organisation to lead the delivery of the different components of the strategy, outlining the financing model, and identifying specific initiatives to take forward in the short term.