Dec 19, 2025

BEI Weekly Update - 19th December 2025

by

David Landsman

by

Dear Members and Friends,

As we approach the end of 2025, by no means an easy year for any of us, I want to start simply with some thanks. First, to our members for being with us: we’re first and foremost a network, so your involvement in our events and reports, and your readiness to share insights and engage with fellow members is vital to our collective effort in promoting British expertise around the world. Talking of collective efforts, my very warm thanks also to all our speakers and stakeholders, from the UK Government and partners across the world for taking time to engage with us and our members throughout the year. We couldn’t do our job without you.

I hope that our Yearbook will bring back memories of a year of valuable collaborations, from a wide range of thematic events, reports on education systems strengthening and water resilience to visiting delegations from Mongolia to New Zealand and Brazil, a trade mission to Kazakhstan and a series of events with multilateral development banks and – last but not least – our always popular Meet the Ambassador series.

In return, I very much hope that you have found value in your membership of or relationship with our network. Members will have heard me (perhaps too) often say that my aspiration is for BEI to be seen as a “must have” not a “nice to have”, enabling our members to build their businesses and find new partners and our stakeholders to broaden their relationships with the best of what the UK has to offer. That will remain our aim for 2026 and we’re very much in the business of finding the ways to do even more. As part of that, we’re in the process of engaging a number of Senior Advisers to strengthen our team; I look forward to introducing them to you soon. In the meantime, please feel free to share your thoughts on how can support your objectives over the coming year.

Looking forward, we are planning another full programme for 2026: the attached infographic provides a flavour of the diversity of the events on offer, in addition to the regular meetings of our various working and interest groups which we will be soon.

To start with, we are currently finalising the first quarter’s activities. For now, here’s “early warning” of what’s coming up at the beginning of the year. Details – and registration links – will appear on the website as soon as we have confirmed dates with speakers. Do look back in the New Year: our first newsletter in January will provide an update.

I hope that those with an interest in climate will be able to join our COP30 Outcomes webinar in the second half of January, which will be an opportunity to hear from members who attended this year’s COP in Belém, with a focus on the key takeaways and future prospects. We will then move on to February’s COP 17 on desertification, with a webinar curated in partnership with the Embassy of Mongolia. Also on the water agenda, we will be holding a webinar on “Reducing Risk and Unlocking Funding for Water Resilience” in February, to explore the role and mechanisms of blended finance in promoting water resilience.

As far as trade more broadly is concerned, there’s been a lot of progress in the past couple of years on free trade agreements, but the concrete benefits for business are still not always clear. We’ve been working with the Department of Business and Trade (DBT) to prepare an informative webinar in late January which will explore how the UK services sector can leverage opportunities from the bilateral Free Trade Agreements the UK has recently signed with key partners. The session will also explore the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) which includes a further 11 important trading partners from Australia and Canada to Malaysia and Vietnam.

Separately on the trade agenda, I’m delighted that we will be hosting the Minister of Economy and Finance of Uruguay for a roundtable in early February - our first event of the year with a Latin America focus. Looking further ahead, we are already working with IADB on our involvement with their planned UK Roadshow in May.

For our international development members, in February we will host a webinar on use cases for AI in International Development. This will showcase examples of best practice in the use of AI to shape development solutions across Africa, the Middle East, and Ukraine. In late March we are planning an event on disability-inclusive health systems across international development contexts.

Finally, for our education members, we’re in discussion with our Government contacts in priority countries to provide opportunities for our members to engage with key decision makers around BETT 2026 London in the third week of January. We will confirm timings for these engagements as soon as we have final details of the visiting delegations.

All of this is of course just the start. Meanwhile, if there’s a theme or a country you’d like us to cover in our programme, please do let us know.

Having spent quite a few Christmases over my career “on duty”, I know some of you won’t be able to take a break at this time. But I hope most of you will; we at BEI will be back in action on Monday 5 January. If the turbulence of 2025 has taught us anything, instability is the new “business as usual”. There are no magic solutions - from leaders, laws or institutions. But we all have our own hopes for a better world and we all have ways of doing something useful. In our small way, I hope we will be able to help you make a difference. But in the meantime, I wish you and your families the best for a peaceful Christmas and a happy New Year.

David Landsman

Executive Chairman

British Expertise International