As the UAE positions human capability at the heart of its next phase of growth, the workplace is emerging as unlikely economic infrastructure. At the centre of that shift is the Parent-friendly Label, a voluntary recognition programme launched by the Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA) in 2021, which rewards organisations that go beyond legal compliance to genuinely support working parents. With government entities now joining in its fourth cycle and 2026 declared the Year of the Family, the initiative has moved from the margins of HR policy to a national workforce strategy.

Fatmah Alkaabi, advisor at the ECA’s Director-General’s Office, explains why the UAE chose to raise the ceiling rather than legislate the floor — and why organisations that invest in their people early will outperform those that wait for regulation to catch up.

What is the ‘Parent-friendly Label’ and why did the UAE launch a voluntary programme instead of regulating parent-friendly workplaces?

The Parent-friendly Label is a UAE-wide voluntary workplace recognition programme launched in 2021 by the Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA). It recognises organisations across the private, government, semi-government, and third sectors that go beyond legal compliance to create genuinely supportive environments for working parents.

ECA oversees the entire early childhood development sector, from birth to age eight. Within that mandate, we play five roles: policy influencer, knowledge hub, enabler, incubator, and impact navigator.

The Parent-friendly Label sits at the intersection of all five. It is not a standalone HR badge. It is a workforce strategy grounded in evidence, validated by UNICEF Gulf, and built through analysis of global research from institutions like the OECD and ILO.

The criteria are rigorous: 19 standards across five categories: parental leave, flexible work, family care, family wellbeing, and culture.

Assessment combines a detailed online application with an independent employee survey, reviewed by a third-party evaluation firm and an independent judging panel of senior UAE public-sector stakeholders. This ensures credibility without bureaucracy.

We chose a voluntary model because sustainable workplace culture cannot be legislated into existence. Regulation sets a floor; the Label raises the ceiling. It gives organisations a clear, research-backed framework to move from intent to implementation, while preserving the flexibility to adapt policies to their own workforce. The result is ownership, not compliance.

How does the label help organisations turn family support from a cost centre into a workforce stability strategy?

The label reframes family support as a workforce investment by giving organisations a measurable, evidence-based path from intent to implementation.

Retention is the clearest return. In the UAE, replacing a mid-career employee costs 50 per cent to 200 per cent of annual salary. Organisations with strong parental support see lower turnover and more resilient talent pipelines, which contribute to operational savings. The 57 per cent participation jump in the last cycle of PFL confirms that industry leaders see the program as an investment, not an expense.

The program moves organisations beyond ad-hoc perks toward integrated policies embedded in culture and monitored for impact. Policies such as six months’ parental leave, dedicated support for parents of Children of Determination, return-to-work programs, and nursing facilities are structural enablers that strengthen both workforce stability and long‑term performance.

The framework ensures continuous improvement, not one-off recognition. Every applicant receives a customised feedback report with actionable recommendations. Label earners join the PFL Connect Community for cross-sector knowledge sharing. The goal is sustained progress, not a plaque on the wall.

Is parent-friendly policy adoption in the UAE a genuine cultural shift, or still largely a compliance exercise?

It is a cultural shift, but only where leadership treats it as one. The data from the PFL Impact Report, Thriving Through Talent: How Parent-Friendly Policies Drive Balance, Growth, and Global Competitiveness, which captured insights from more than 11,000 employees across 83 organisations in the last cycle, reflects this clearly. Seventy-one per cent of employees reported improved daily productivity as a result of parent-friendly policies. 68 per cent said these policies influenced their decision to extend their job tenure by at least 2 years, while 77 per cent would recommend their employer as a parent-friendly workplace. These are not compliance metrics.

They are indicators of whether employees feel genuinely supported or simply accommodated.

The demographic signals reinforce this shift. 88 per cent of mothers felt supported to take their full maternity leave, while 65 per cent said flexible arrangements and nursing breaks made returning to work easier. Among fathers, 74 per cent said their managers actively encouraged paternity leave, a meaningful sign that shared caregiving is becoming more normalised.

Among the employees surveyed, 73 per cent also viewed the UAE as a parent-friendly place to work, showing how workplace culture can strengthen both employer reputation and the UAE’s competitiveness as a destination for talent.

What separates organisations that move the needle from those that don’t?

Accountability. The label assesses not just what policies exist, but how employees experience them. The mandatory Parent-friendly Experience Survey conducted by an independent third party captures whether employees understand their options, feel comfortable exercising them, and believe their managers apply support consistently.

Organisations that excel in survey outcomes share three traits. First, leadership visibly champions the agenda through structured manager training and regular policy review. Second, they measure and act on employee feedback, using data to refine support rather than simply report it. Third, they recognise that parent-friendly practices are workforce practices, not HR initiatives. They tie flexibility to career progression, ensure job evaluations account for flexible working arrangements, and protect employee benefits and roles during parental leave. These elements close the gap between policy intent and lived reality, and that level of accountability is what truly drives impact.

In Cycle 4, government entities are joining the label. How does it change the competitive landscape for private organisations?

The UAE treats family support as national infrastructure. The UAE’s President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan has consistently reaffirmed the country’s commitment to family stability and cohesion, and the declaration of 2026 as the Year of the Family reinforces that at the highest level. National frameworks such as The National Strategy for Wellbeing 2031 and We the UAE 2031 place strong families, healthy childhoods, and human capability at the centre of long‑term progress.

The Parent‑friendly Label program sits within that ecosystem, a mechanism designed to embed positive institutional culture across organisations, especially those that drive economic growth. In simple terms: organisations safeguard the economy, and we safeguard their people.

With government entities entering the pilot phase in Cycle 4, a new baseline for the entire labour market is being set. It signals that parent‑friendly practices are no longer optional differentiators; they are gradually becoming an expected standard for operating in a future‑ready UAE. The country is transitioning from a growth model built on capital and infrastructure to one built on human capability. In that shift, the organisation, be it public or private, that invests in its people early and consistently will outperform those that do not.

The UAE has declared 2026 the Year of the Family. For an organisation still on the fence, what’s the business case for acting now rather than waiting for regulation to catch up?

We encourage organisations to act now, because when regulation eventually follows, the talent you want will have already committed to those who led first.

The UAE’s future development model is explicit: every system, from the workplace to the community, should be intentionally designed around the wellbeing of children and families from the very beginning of life. The Year of the Family is not a commemoration. It is a policy accelerant. Organisations that align now will be positioned as partners in national progress, not followers of mandates.

The economic case around this is already clear. The PFL programme has benefited over 163,000 employees in the UAE, with more than one million employees globally positively affected through international organisations operating here.

Cycle 3 data shows that 68% of employees say parent-friendly support influences their decision to stay beyond two years. In a market where nearly 90 per cent of UAE-based employees prefer hybrid or fully remote work arrangements, organisations that delay are not maintaining neutrality; they are actively ceding ground to competitors who have already moved.

The Parent-friendly Label offers a structured, low-risk entry point. The application process is designed to support improvement, not just reward perfection. Every applicant receives detailed feedback. The two-year Label validity includes a 12-month check-in with assessors to guide continuous progress. The PFL Connect Community provides peer learning from organisations that have already navigated the same challenges.

Waiting for regulation is a reactive posture. The organisations that will define the UAE’s next decade are those that recognise family support as a strategic economic lever now — supporting retention, productivity, female workforce participation, and employer competitiveness.

Read: Emirati women hold Dhs39bn in shares on ADX

The UAE’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 sets out a clear ambition: to become a global leader in AI, driving economic growth across priority sectors while building the data, talent, and infrastructure to sustain it. Alongside the UAE’s Net Zero by 2050 strategy, this forms a single journey: the infrastructure choices that help organisations scale AI while supporting their sustainability goals.

Our approach at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provide customers the abilility to drive both outcomes together. Whether it is to scale generative AI, run large-scale analytics, or train machine learning models, the same architectural choices that improve performance are those that improve efficiency.

Efficient Architecture, National-Scale Impact

Optimising an organisation’s digital estate for efficiency simultaneously reduces its environmental footprint too. Cloud-native architecture allows for capacity to scale automatically matching real-time demand, so organisations consume energy only when their systems are actively processing work.

Building efficient cloud workloads becomes easier with the sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It focuses on minimising environmental impact through energy consumption and efficiency, providing organisations with a structured process to right-size resources, modernise workloads, and refine their architecture.

AWS Graviton: Powering Sustainable Compute, Chip by Chip

AWS has taken this principle a step further by embedding it directly into silicon. AWS has invested up to AED 20.1 billion in its UAE cloud region, an investment expected to contribute AED 41 billion to the UAE economy by 2037, supporting the infrastructure and talent goals set out in the National AI Strategy. Central to that infrastructure is AWS Graviton, AWS’s custom-built processor for general cloud workloads. Over 120,000 AWS customers have reaped the benefits of Graviton, with many completing their adoptions in just hours.

Careem, the region’s Everything App, adopted AWS Graviton-based instances to power its cloud workloads, achieving up to 40 per cent better price performance and up to 60 per cent lower energy consumption for the same performance compared to x86-based instances. This let Careem scale its services across millions of users while cutting its operational carbon footprint, showing that growth and sustainability can move forward together.

Amazon Redshift: Turning Data into Insights

Data is the foundation of the UAE National AI Strategy’s ambitions, and how efficiently it is processed matters. Amazon Redshift, AWS’s data warehousing service, runs on AWS Graviton-powered instances delivering up to 2.2 times faster performance for data warehousing and up to 2.4 times faster performance for data lake workloads, at 30 per cent lower cost per compute unit than the previous generation. Redshift Serverless automatically scales compute up and down with demand, ensuring businesses use only the energy their workloads need.

Dubizzle Group is MENA’s largest Classifieds platform, serving over 20 million monthly users across dubizzle, Bayut, Property Monitor, and DriveArabia. Leveraging Amazon Redshift and Amazon Redshift Serverless to process 30 to 40 billion data records, the Group dynamically scales compute capacity based on demand, eliminating unnecessary always-on infrastructure and optimising energy consumption. This next-generation cloud architecture enables AI-powered personalisation and real-time insights at scale, advancing the UAE’s vision for sustainable digital innovation.

AWS Trainium: Accelerating AI Training, Sustainably

Training large AI models is one of the most computing-intensive tasks in modern technology, and one of the clearest areas where efficient hardware makes a measurable difference. AWS Trainium, AWS’s chip purpose-built for machine learning, uses approximately 25 per cent less total energy to train large AI models compared with equivalent accelerated cloud instances.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of models, is applying this at scale. As AWS’s primary training and cloud provider, Anthropic has committed to securing up to 5 gigawatts of current and future generations of Trainium chips to train and power its advanced AI models – including through Project Rainier, one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters with nearly half a million Trainium2 chips. With over 100,000 customers running Claude models on Amazon Bedrock, this infrastructure enables organisations across the region and beyond to access frontier AI capabilities built on energy-efficient custom silicon, aligning performance at scale with more sustainable computing.

Why Efficiency Is a Business Decision

For leaders across the region, aligning IT strategy with national AI and sustainability goals is beyond an ESG reporting exercise. Every efficiency gained through better infrastructure decision making is a direct reduction in operating cost.

The UAE has a clear opportunity to demonstrate AI and sustainability leadership together. By building on custom silicon like AWS Graviton and Trainium, and cloud-native services like Amazon Redshift, organisations across the UAE are executing the National AI Strategy into measurable results.

Nestle wants India to consult with companies when drafting rules for front-of-pack health labelling on food and drinks to ensure it is done “scientifically,” its chief executive said, amid a public debate on the lack of such measures in the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has for years tried to implement some form of warning labels on packaging, but dropped a proposal after companies like Coca-Cola and industry groups representing the likes of Nestle in March opposed the measures, Reuters reported earlier this week.

Since the story was published, consumers and health experts in India have expressed their anger on social media. Companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle have voluntarily put similar labels on their products in many European markets for years.

Nestle CEO Philipp Navratil told India’s Economic Times newspaper that while the company supports front-of-pack labelling for products with high sugar, salt and fat, manufacturers should be consulted in the process.

“It’s always good to have a voice from companies; there might be different views (on the subject),” Navratil said in the interview, published on Thursday. “We can be part of the debate in terms of making sure it’s scientifically done.”

India’s Supreme Court, after hearing the pleas of health activists, slammed New Delhi for delays and called for implementing front-facing warning labels.

Food safety regulator FSSAI did not respond to Reuters queries on the matter.

Consumer anger

Nearly 80 per cent of products made by India’s more than $100bn packaged food and beverages market could be regarded as high in fat, sugar and salt, according to industry estimates.

Activists say companies should not be consulted in deciding on labelling.

“Nestle’s call for industry participation in India’s labelling rules is a clear attempt to weaken public health policy,” said Dr Arun Gupta, the convenor of Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest, a national think tank on nutrition. “They have used warning labels in Europe since 2013 while their trade bodies fought them in India.”

Nestle did not respond to Reuters requests for further comments.

There has been a wave of stricter enforcement recently in India on food safety issues, with a maverick officer in Mumbai achieving celebrity status for raiding and suspending many eateries’ licenses.

The Reuters story this week also revealed that companies make different versions of the same products to comply with local regulations, tastes and spending capacity.

“Why Global Brands Take Indian Users Lightly? This is Terrible,” Ravisutanjani Kumar, an Indian entrepreneur, wrote on X.

A can of Fanta sold in London has 63 calories, but the same-sized product in India contains three times as much sugar and 185 calories.

“They are right when they say it would cost more to use healthier ingredients,” said Vir Sanghvi, one of India’s best-known food writers, in a column on Thursday. “The prices of their products would go up … but is that such a bad thing?”

“For the multinationals and their profits, perhaps. But for the health of our nation? I doubt it very much.”

Around 84 per cent of organisations across the Gulf are already using artificial intelligence in some form, but just 11 per cent have scaled deployments far enough to generate measurable returns, according to McKinsey and the GCC Board Directors Institute.

The findings underline a growing challenge for companies investing heavily in AI: the technology is only as reliable as the data and systems behind it.

Accelera Digital Group (ADG), a technology firm operating across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, says many Gulf organisations are still grappling with legacy data silos, inconsistent governance and fragmented cloud environments — creating a hidden cost it describes as the “silent AI tax”.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud’s ‘The ROI of Gen AI’ report found that 74 per cent of organisations experimenting with AI were already seeing some return. But ADG argues there is a significant difference between generating early gains and achieving meaningful returns at scale.

“Most businesses in this region have built AI into their strategy, with strong leadership behind it, but far fewer have asked whether their data can actually support it,” said Mohammed Ashoor, Bahrain country manager at ADG.

“That’s the silent tax. It shows up in stalled pilots, agents sitting idle because nobody trusts the data behind them, and budgets that underperform without anyone quite knowing why.”

The issue is becoming more pressing as Gulf companies increase spending on the technology.

McKinsey and the GCC Board Directors Institute found that 89 per cent of Gulf executives expect AI budgets to rise this year, while just 31 per cent of organisations have moved deployments beyond the pilot stage.

The stakes are also rising as businesses move beyond chatbots and generative AI tools towards AI agents capable of carrying out tasks and taking actions with less direct human supervision.

For regulated sectors including banking, insurance and government, that raises wider questions around data quality, compliance, security and auditability.

ADG argues that the underlying data architecture needs to be governed, traceable and secure before autonomous AI systems are given greater responsibility, rather than attempting to bolt compliance controls on after they have entered production.

Greater focus on AI access

But data quality is only part of the challenge.

Andreas Hassellof, CEO of technology company Ombori, argues that businesses must also set clear limits on what AI agents are allowed to access, change and spend — and establish who ultimately remains responsible for their actions.

“A person still owns the standard, the limits, and the decision to ship,” Hassellof said.

He argues that companies should define those boundaries before AI systems are introduced into real-world workflows, with particular care around payments, customer data and other actions that cannot easily be reversed.

There is also a broader question over the standards embedded within increasingly autonomous AI systems.

Most leading AI models are developed by a relatively small number of companies, principally in the US and China. Hassellof argues that organisations elsewhere should not automatically assume those systems will reflect their own regulatory, operational or institutional priorities.

“The standard should be yours,” Hassellof said.

“A borrowed model can run the loop. It should not, by default, become the source of what good, safe or finished means in a business, a hospital or a government.”

Instead, he argues that companies should retain control over the standards against which AI systems operate, including what they may read or change, what actions they may take and who has the authority to stop them.

That does not remove the need for human accountability as AI becomes more capable.

“A person should remain the responsible party,” Hassellof said. “Someone has to own the objective, the boundary and the result.”

For Gulf businesses, the debate is therefore increasingly moving beyond whether to invest in AI.

As spending rises and AI systems are entrusted with more complex work, the bigger question is whether the data, governance and controls surrounding them are strong enough to turn that investment into measurable returns.

Q Mobility has announced special timings and fee arrangements for Darb toll gates and Mawaqif parking spaces during the Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday holiday, aimed at facilitating movement and improving traffic flow across Abu Dhabi, a WAM report said.

Darb tolls waived on Friday

Toll charges at the Darb gates, including Sas Al Nakhl, Al Maqta’, Rabdan and Al Saadiyat, will be waived on Friday, August 28, 2026, Q Mobility said.

The company added that toll charges will resume on Saturday, August 29, in line with the approved schedule.

Read more-Public holiday: RTA announces transport timings, free public parking

However, toll fees at the Al Qurm and Ghantout gates will continue to apply 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at Dhs4 per crossing.

Mawaqif parking goes free

Q Mobility also said public parking spaces across Abu Dhabi, excluding multi-storey public parking buildings, will be free of charge on Friday.

Standard parking fees and timings will resume on Saturday, 29th August, under the regular tariffs.

Parking charges at multi-storey public parking buildings will remain applicable around the clock throughout the week at the usual rates.

Customer centres to close

Customer Happiness Centres in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain will be closed on Friday, with services resuming on Monday, August 31, during regular working hours, the company said.

Q Mobility emphasised that its digital services will remain available 24/7 through its official channels, including the website, the Darb application and the TAMM platform.