Qatar Foundation opens a call for collaboration on AI and work across the Global Majority

Qatar Foundation’s AI Hub opens a call for collaboration to build a fuller picture of how AI is affecting work across the Global Majority, and to help turn this evidence into practical policy. The call forms part of The Next Wave, Qatar Foundation’s research programme to develop a validated methodology for measuring AI’s effects on employment, occupations, and wages in economies where such measurement does not currently exist. The call is open to universities, research institutes, industry, governments, multilateral bodies, civil society organisations, and funders that can help extend the research, apply its findings, or support its wider use.

Professor Emmanouil Chatzikonstantinou, Study Lead, Georgetown University in Qatar, said:

"The impact of AI on jobs is one of our generation's defining global policy challenges. Only a collaborative, international effort across academia, government, and industry can generate the global empirical data and research needed to guide human-centered AI policies.”

To start a conversation, contact the Qatar Foundation AI Hub.

This open call has been announced as part of the London School of Economics and Political Science’s 2026 Global Forum for AI and the Social Sciences. To build momentum and unlock new forms of coordinated and collective action, selected organisations from around the world have been invited to use the Global Forum as a platform for releasing work, launching new initiatives, or making commitments related to the Forum's annual focus.

The opportunity | Statement from Qatar Foundation

Almost everything currently known about how AI is changing work comes from a small number of advanced economies. The most credible measurements depend on high-frequency payroll data that exists in very few countries, and most of the institutions producing that evidence sit in the same places. The social sciences, best placed to explain what AI is actually doing to workers and institutions, remain under-resourced relative to the pace of the technology they are trying to understand. The consequences are that governments, employers, and communities across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America are trying to make decisions on labour policy, education, social protection, and industrial strategy without enough evidence drawn from their own economies.

Qatar Foundation is contributing one piece of the answer. Its research programme, The Next Wave, is building a validated methodology for measuring AI's effect on employment, occupations, and wages in economies where such measurement does not currently exist. The method is being validated first in Qatar and Singapore – two Global Majority economies with the state capacity and data quality to test it rigorously – and is designed to extend to large economies including Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Egypt. It will be published openly, so that any country can apply it to its own data, on its own terms. It is one example of work that needs many more hands.

Qatar Foundation is inviting universities, research institutes, industry, governments, multilateral bodies, and civil society organisations to help build a fuller picture of AI's effect on work across the Global Majority, and to turn that picture into policy that can be used. Four lanes are open:

• Measurement and evidence: Adapting rigorous, high-frequency methods to labour markets unlike those most existing studies were built on, and to the education and public systems that feed them
• Policy translation: Turning comparative findings into frameworks that governments and institutions outside the usual research centers can act on
• Talent and capacity: Growing a generation of researchers and practitioners equipped to study AI's economic effects in their own contexts
• Convening and exchange: Creating recurring, evidence-first venues where findings across regions are compared rather than produced in isolation.

The invitation is open to research partners who can extend measurement methods to new contexts, institutions and governments who can host or apply the evidence, and funders and industry partners who can help the work reach the scale the problem deserves.

About Qatar Foundation

Qatar Foundation (QF) is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to advancing education, research and innovation, and community development for the benefit of Qatar and the world. Founded in 1995 by His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the late Father Amir, and Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, QF began with a vision to provide Qatar with quality education. Over more than three decades, that vision has grown into a globally unique, multidisciplinary ecosystem of knowledge that fosters lifelong learning, drives innovation and entrepreneurship, advances social development, and empowers people to become active citizens and drivers of positive change. Underlying everything QF does is a belief that the future depends on unlocking the most valuable resource of all: human potential.

About the Global Forum for AI and the Social Sciences

The Global Forum for AI and the Social Sciences is an annual flagship event bringing together leaders across government, industry, academia, and civil society from around the world. Organised by the LSE Data Science Institute, the Global Forum aims to convene international dialogue at the intersection of AI and the social sciences and to mobilise expertise, resources, and partnerships to ensure AI serves human and societal needs.

The inaugural edition of the Global Forum will take place on 16 and 17 September 2026 with a thematic focus on how AI is reshaping work and what governments, firms, and workers must do to prepare for the changes ahead.