DAVOS: Saudi Arabia is to launch a new Quality of Life Index — developed in partnership with UN-Habitat — the Kingdom’s Tourism Minister Ahmed Al-Khateeb announced on Tuesday, with Saudi Ambassador to the US Princess Reema bint Bandar calling it a Saudi “gift to the world.”
Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Al-Khateeb said the index was positioned as a global public resource designed to help people, cities and governments better understand what makes urban life thrive.
Princess Reema described the index as a reflection of the Kingdom’s broader Vision 2030 reforms and a tool intended to benefit people far beyond Saudi Arabia.
She said: “The Quality of Life Index is not just a Saudi initiative, it’s a UN initiative. The ownership of the data and the content lives there. We’re populating it and we are gifting it to the world — and that’s one of the things that’s most exciting for me.”
The index, which has been under development for three years as part of a wider Quality of Life Program in the Kingdom, aims to provide a comprehensive, human-centered assessment of how cities perform across a wide range of factors that shape everyday life, from healthcare, education and mobility to safety, culture, entertainment and green spaces.
According to Al-Khateeb, the initiative was born out of a simple and yet complex question: What is the city people actually want to live in?
“When we started the Quality of Life Program back in 2017, we began by asking ourselves what kind of city we want to live in,” the minister said.
“That question is complicated because younger generations have different needs to the older generations, and cities today must serve both residents and visitors.”
Al-Khateeb explained that the framework behind the index separated the fundamentals of urban living, what he described as “livability,” from the experiences on top of that foundation.
“No city in the world today can tick all the boxes,” he said. “That’s why we worked with UN-Habitat to define what the best quality of life should look like, identify the gaps, and then measure them.”
The index will allow cities around the world to voluntarily register, submit data and be assessed against those criteria. According to Al-Khateeb, more than 120 cities have already registered, with over 20 vetted and qualified at the time of the announcement.
The goal, he said, was to give individuals and families practical information to help guide life decisions, whether choosing where to live, work, retire or visit, while also giving city leaders a clearer picture of where investment and reform were needed.
“Any global resident can go to the website, look at the cities and decide where they want to live or retire, or where they want to visit,” he said. “This is about experience, not just retail or hospitality or education on their own, but all of it together.”
Princess Reema linked the index directly to the social transformation underway in Saudi Arabia, particularly around participation, opportunity and equity for women.
Reflecting on her experience working on the program with Al-Khateeb, she said the reforms succeeded because they were built around people, not metrics alone.
“For quality of life to be real, a woman could no longer have to ask for permission to participate or to get herself where she needed to be,” she said, describing a pivotal moment early in the program’s development. “That’s when I knew the change we were hoping for was real.”
She pointed to visible outcomes, particularly among young people, as the true measure of success, arguing that quality of life was ultimately reflected in the choices people were able to make.
“You cannot be what you cannot see,” she said. “What I see in the opportunities people now have, whether they’re artists, athletes, filmmakers or musicians, that is the true measurement of quality of life.”
While Saudi Arabia expects its own cities to feature in the rankings, Princess Reema stressed that the index was not designed as a competition.
She added: “We’re competing to make ourselves better — for who we serve, for where we are. If that makes us No. 1, great. But the goal is improvement.”
Both speakers emphasized that the index is intended to evolve over time, reflecting changing expectations and generational needs.
Technology, Princess Reema added, should be viewed as a tool to support human well-being, not the objective itself.
“Human-centric is the goal,” she said. “Technology is simply the tool.”
Speaking to Arab News after the panel, Norah Al-Yousef, a senior adviser at the Quality of Life Program, said the development of the index was a four-year, globally consultative effort to create something of value to people and governments alike.
“So many cities and governments that we consulted with, verbatim, said, ‘If you create another index to rank me, I’m not interested. Help me solve problems, help enable me’,” she said.
“It’s a narrative shift. We’re kick-starting it with this, and we really hope that, globally, people adopt it, people support it. You know, it’s like a snowball effect.”
