Commonwealth Business Forum 2022

The brief

The Commonwealth Business Forum runs inside the week of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. It is where the business of the Commonwealth actually gets done.

CHOGM had been postponed twice. Rwanda had invested heavily in hosting it. And the Commonwealth business community had spent two years apart, watching trade slow and relationships thin out. This was the first large in-person gathering of Commonwealth governments and businesses since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The 2022 forum carried more than its usual weight.

Rwanda Development Board asked Cube to fill the room and build a programme worth flying for.

The complication

Two problems sat underneath that brief.

The first was the venue. The Kigali Conference and Exhibition Village was still being renovated, on a fixed handover date, against a budget that had already moved. There was no version of this event that worked if the building was not finished — and no possibility of moving the date, because the date belonged to CHOGM.

The second was hesitation. Delegates were not simply waiting to be invited. Many were still weighing whether to travel at all, and a 700-person target assumed a level of confidence that did not yet exist in the market. Filling the room meant giving people a reason strong enough to overcome that.

What we did

We project-managed the venue. Cube took the project management role on the KCEV renovation and delivered the building on time. Alongside the venue owner and the wider stakeholder group, we worked through the budget line by line — finding lower-cost, more sustainable routes to the same standard rather than cutting the standard. We tracked every task across the board, from purchase of construction materials to the logistics of shipping equipment in the middle of a pandemic.

Event project management is what we do every day. Applying it to the venue renovation itself was a natural extension of the same discipline.

We built the programme around what needed resolving. Working with RDB and government institutions, we shaped the agenda around the conversations the Commonwealth business community actually needed to have: what had been lost, what needed rebuilding, and what could be accelerated. We developed the content architecture, iterated it with the client to sign-off, and curated a speaking list of 200+ voices across the three days.

We also hosted the Commonwealth delegation's site visits from the UK and produced several films for incoming delegations, briefing them on what Rwanda was preparing and what to expect on arrival.

We mobilised the money. Cube ran resource mobilisation across sponsorship, exhibition space and registration. We were selective about it. The brief was not to find anyone with a budget — it was to find organisations positioned to carry the forum's outcomes forward after the rooms emptied.

We designed spaces to match the conversations. The programme came first; the rooms were designed backwards from it. A think-tank format seated 60 people around tables of eight for the discussions that needed depth and candour. A large plenary carried the headline sessions. Smaller rooms held the innovation conversations.

None of this was new for the sake of being new. A room tells you what is expected of you before anyone speaks. Sit eight people around a circular table in a room of sixty and they understand immediately that this is a working conversation, that their contribution is expected, and that the connections made here are meant to last.