To bring together the most successful female entrepreneurs and leaders and inspire many more across the globe, particularly in the Middle East region, Forbes hosted its fourth annual Forbes 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi on March 5-8, 2025, during International Women’s Day.

The Forbes 30/50 Summit focuses on creating cross-generational mentorship opportunities to provide leadership, guidance, and insights to women at every stage of their career. It also offers diverse perspectives focused on women in leadership and entrepreneurship and provided rich cultural immersion opportunities.

The agenda not only offered a platform for speakers to share insights and experiences as part of an engaging series of on-stage discussions, but also featured Idea Forums – a structured, impactful time of networking and workshops – that provided attendees with the ability to share their voices and actively participate in knowledge shares on topics including corporate leadership, entrepreneurship, investment, creative economy and impact.

The summit also offered rich cultural immersive opportunities across Abu Dhabi, through the input of its local partners and sponsors Saadiyat Rotana Resort & Villas and Experience Abu Dhabi.

Chaired by “Know Your Value” founder and Co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Mika Brzezinski, MSNBC Contributor, ForbesWomen Editor Maggie McGrath and Author Huma Abedin, the event standed as the physical headquarters for International Women’s Day – uplifting and celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of all women.

The Forbes 30/50 Summit was presented by Cisco.

The 4-day event, hosted by Moira Forbes, President, ForbesWomen & Executive Vice President, Forbes and Maggie McGrath, Editor of ForbesWomen, and chaired by Mika Brezinski, Founder of Know Your Value included a mix of panel conversations, networking opportunities, giving-back moments and cultural exploration.

DAY ONE – 30/50 SERVICE DAY AND EXPLORATION
As part of Forbes effort to uplift women and girls across the world during the Summit, the 30/50 service and experience day was an opportunity for attendees and speakers to celebrate each other and spread their messages and insights to women in the local community. Programming included:**

• Abu Dhabi Tours & Experiences; Forbes’ let attendees choose their own adventure exploring the city’s most significant sites.
• Service Day: Forbes’ annual service day provided attendees with a mentorship opportunity at the Cranleigh School alongside some of Abu Dhabi’s brightest students.
• Al Wathba Desert Party: To welcome attendees from around the world, Forbes hosted an authentic desert party in Al Wathba to kick off the 2025 30/50 Summit.

DAY TWO & THREE – IMPACTFUL CONVERSATIONS & PERSPECTIVES
During Days 2 and 3, no less than 16 sessions a day were held, including panel conversations, Idea forums, networking sessions and an Awards Gala:

• Women, Wealth and What Comes Next: a conversation with Elissar Farah Antonios, Founder of Soul Ventures Holding Ltd and Racquel Oden, Head of International Wealth at HSBC Bank.
• Idea Forums: an impactful time of networking and workshops with intimate conversations across the whole event’s venue. With the help of the event’s app, attendees could build their schedule and interact with speakers around five idea forums: Corporate Leaders, Entrepreneurship, Money & Investing, Creative Economy, Impact.
• The Forbes 30/50 Summit International Women’s Day Awards Gala: hosted at the exclusive Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the evening hosted by the Minister of State, UAE Foreign Affairs celebrated women who have helped shape history.

DAY FOUR – INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY BRUNCH

Throughout the event, Forbes has solidified a world-class speaker lineup, including:
• Freida Pinto, Actress & Activist
• Yusra Mardini, Olympic Swimmer & UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador
• Trinny Woodall, Founder & CEO, Trinny London
• Najlah Imad, Para Table Tennis Athlete & Paralympic Gold Medalist
• Sherrese Clarke Soares, Founder & CEO, HarbourView Equity Partners
• Angela Tabiri, Mathematician & Founder, Femafricmaths
• Linda Rama, Albanian Economist, Advocate, wife of Albanian Prime Minister
• Lucy Goff, Founder, LYMA
• Huma Abedin, Vice Chair, 30/50 Summit, MNSBC Contributor & Author

To reach the right audience and give the Summit’s sponsor Cisco exposure, Forbes deployed pre-event digital branding: a series of audience recruitment emails, a boosted registration page on Forbes.com, and organic promotion across Forbes social handles (LinkedIn, Meta). Press communications kits were distributed to worldwide media outlets for international media exposure, where Cisco featured as a Presenting Sponsor across all communication touchpoints.

At the event, Cisco was given the opportunity of Executive speaking on-stage, with integration in the New Architecture of Impact fireside chat with Macy Andrews, VP and Chief of Staff, People and Purpose at Cisco. The latter was enhanced on Cisco’s owned social communications and platforms.

Forbes’ social channels offer a platform for the Forbes 30/50 community, honorees, attendees, speakers, and major news outlets to engage and share experiences from the renowned event – amplifying powerful moments to a global audience. Forbes leveraged social to produce pre-, during and post-event targeted social assets that amplified brand integrations for the three partners (including sponsors Saadiyat Rotana Resort & Villas and Experience Abu Dhabi), with guaranteed views and impressions.

Audience engagement with the Forbes 30/50 Franchise and Summit continues far beyond the event. Serving as an extension of this year’s Summit programming, Forbes developed a robust content experience landing page that will live on Forbes.com in perpetuity.

The post-event content experience includes event highlights— from speaker quotes, to photographs, to sponsor logo inclusion and more. The event lander was included in the post-event ‘Thank You’ e-mail to all attendees providing continued exposure for the memorable conversations hosted at this year’s event.

To celebrate and elevate this year’s event, Forbes created two (2x) custom, full-page print ads to be included in our magazine issues both pre-event and post-event, reaching Forbes 5.7M readers.

In addition to coverage on Forbes.com and the Know Your Value platform, the 30/50 Summit received powerful amplification across MSNBC, including segments on Morning Joe, bringing the summit’s inspiring highlights to a national bigger audience.

Summit attendees

The Summit received 454 engaged attendees (30 Under 30 list-makers, 50 Over 50 list-makers, VIP guests, powerful female business leaders and ForbesWomen community members). Almost half of the Summit’s attendees registered to participate in local tours and experiences, including a service day in Abu Dhabi. Individuals from all around the world attended this year’s Summit, with 40 countries represented:

• 45% of attendees were Under 30 or Over 50
• 44% were UAE residents (up from 27% the previous year)
• 75% joined the Brella app to network and opt-in on further sponsors’ communications
• Top attendee titles were CEO, Founder, Director

Global media coverage

The 2025 Forbes 30/50 Summit was announced with a spotlight on January and coverage in many local, national and worldwide publications and broadcast outlets. The online and broadcast coverage garnered 57 total mentions which has a readership of 399M. On the social media front, there were a total of potential impressions of 5,108,481,728 and 2.6K+ mentions.

The event also received press pick-up in mainstream media and trade magazines (MSNBC, The National, Mint, OneArabia, Sharjah,…), expanding the impact of the event to billions.

Partnerships coverage

The alliance with Know Your Value, MSNBC and the Morning Joe show significantly increased reach in North America:

• 285M viewership related to the 30/50 Summit
• 30+ segments on Morning Joe highlighted the Summit and powerful female voices
• 8.3M social impressions generated across Know Your Value platforms in support of the Summit
• 31M social impressions generated across Morning Joe platforms in support of the Summit

Forbes social reach

The whole event gathered 5B+ online impressions across the various social handles (LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok), with more than 3,000 mentions using Forbes hashtags #3050, #Forbes3050, #3050summit, #3050abudhabi.

30 -50 Summit media + photos

2025 Forbes 30/50 Summit