Abu Dhabi has officially been selected to host the 2019 United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) General Conference (GC), the organisation's supreme policy-making organ which convenes every two years.
The announcement was made following a vote by the 53 member states of the Industrial Development Board (IDB) at their 46th annual meeting in Vienna, Austria, where they convened to review the implementation of the UNIDO work programme, approve budgets, and make recommendations to the GC on policy matters.
Since becoming a specialised agency in 1985, UNIDO has never hosted the GC in the Middle East, and only hosted it away from its Vienna headquarters three times: in Bangkok, Thailand (1987), Yaoundé, Cameroon (1993), and Lima, Peru (2013).
The GC is scheduled to be held at the end of 2019 and will be preceded by UNIDO's Least Developed Countries (LDCs) Ministerial Conference.