Will QDB finance your project?

There is a question that comes before the feasibility study, before the financial model, and before the application form. It is whether QDB finances what you intend to do at all.

It is worth settling first because the answer is largely published, and because getting it wrong is expensive in a way that stays invisible until late. An applicant who commissions a study, assembles licences and audited accounts, and submits into a category the bank has already classified as unattractive has spent months and real money on a decision that was made before the file was opened.

This article sets out what QDB publishes on eligibility. It does not cover the model itself — that is a separate piece — and it does not cover the parts of the assessment that are discretionary. It covers the part you can check yourself in an afternoon.

The sectors QDB finances

QDB Direct Financing is directed at projects in manufacturing, education, healthcare, services, agriculture, livestock and fisheries.

Four fields are excluded outright. QDB's published FAQ states that the bank supports all industry sectors adding value to the economy except real estate, trading, contractor and construction.

That exclusion is broader than it first reads. Trading — buying and reselling without transformation — covers a large share of Qatari SME activity. Contracting and construction cover another. If your commercial registration describes what you do in those terms, direct project finance is not the route, whatever the numbers look like.

The list that decides most of the rest

Alongside the Direct Financing application documents, QDB publishes a List of Unattractive Industries, dated September 2025. It names specific activities, by sector, that the bank has classified as less attractive to finance.

QDB explains the basis. The list draws on indicators including changing supply dynamics, the absence of necessary raw material, a product's manufacturing cost relative to its import cost, and export dynamics.

The service activities on it are the ones most likely to surprise an applicant.

• Food and beverage outlets of every kind — restaurants, booths, stalls, mobile trucks, kiosks, industrial kitchens, traditional kitchens, catering and bakeries. The list states this applies to franchise and non-franchise concepts alike.
• Hotels, resorts and hotel apartments, and the operation of them
• Salons and spas — hairdressing, beauty treatment, nail parlours, barber shops, massage, facials, saunas
• Dry cleaning and laundry, including rug and carpet cleaning
• Tailoring workshops, traditional and non-traditional
• Cleaning companies
• Manpower sourcing — headhunting, and temporary or permanent staff supply
• Nurseries and kindergartens
• Automobile garages — repair, maintenance, wash
• Conventional travel agencies and ticketing offices
• Clinics, across three separate entries: solo specialised clinics in dentistry, dermatology or obstetrics and gynaecology; polyclinics of two to three disciplines where half or more are those specialisms; and polyclinics of four or more disciplines where that group accounts for half of revenue

On the manufacturing side the list runs to several pages and is organised by product family. It covers named items across food and beverage manufacturing — industrial bakery, short-shelf-life juice, milk, pasta, potato chips, bottled water — metal products such as aluminium extrusion, copper wire, steel structures, welding electrodes and pre-engineered buildings, non-metallic minerals including hollow blocks, ready-mix cement, flat glass and tiles, plastics and rubber including conventional plastic pipes, PET preforms, UPVC profiles, windows and doors, plastic tanks and shopping bags, paper products including cardboard boxes, tissue paper and diapers, and a general category taking in carpentry, detergents, electric cables, perfume, safety shoes and industrial resins.

Chicken farming and dairy farming both appear.

The list is narrower than it looks

It is not a blanket prohibition, and reading it as one produces the opposite error. Four qualifications are published on the document itself, and each one matters.

So the honest reading is not that QDB will not finance a bakery. It is that a greenfield bakery for the local market sits in a category the bank has already assessed as oversupplied, and that an application will have to answer that directly rather than ignore it.

Ownership and company requirements

QDB publishes five conditions a company applying for funding must meet.

• The application must be submitted under the ownership of a Qatari citizen, evidenced by Qatari ID
• The project must be within the sectors the bank supports and finances
• The company must provide a feasibility study for the project to be financed
• The company must be headquartered in Qatar, for existing and emerging projects
• The company must comply with Qatari law governing commercial companies

The first is the one that ends conversations. It is a requirement of the application, not a preference expressed during assessment.

The third is worth noting for what it does not say. The feasibility study is listed as a condition of funding in the same breath as the ownership requirement and the sector requirement. It is not a supporting document.

What QDB lends against

The published Direct Financing terms are specific, and they are stated as ceilings rather than as norms.

Direct Financing — published maximums

Against	Published maximum
Total project cost	up to 60%
Equipment and machinery, excluding construction	up to 80%
Raw material	up to 100%
Salaries and rent, first six months of operations	up to 100%
Maximum finance term	15 years
Maximum grace period, within the term	3 years
Return rate	up to 5%

Read them as outer limits rather than as expectations. An approved facility is commonly structured well inside these figures, and a model built to the ceiling on every line will overstate what the financing actually does for the project.

One consequence is worth drawing out. The percentages attach to categories, not to the project. A project that is largely machinery on a leased facility, and one that involves substantial civil works, do not produce the same funded proportion even at identical cost. The composition of your capital expenditure determines the answer as much as the total does.

QDB also publishes something useful about pricing. The profit rate is reduceable: the bank states that customers can lower the rate offered by increasing their capital contribution or by bringing additional collateral. Equity is not only a gate to clear. It is a lever on cost.

How the project is scored

QDB publishes the criteria applied to funding decisions, and they are not primarily financial.

• Entrepreneurial score — whether the project is expected to foster entrepreneurship culture in Qatar
• IP and technology — higher scoring for high-end technology requirements and new intellectual property created for Qatar
• Demand–supply gap — a positive gap in Qatar, existing or expected
• Raw material — whether the sector makes extensive use of available raw material
• Environment and energy — environmentally favourable, renewable energy use
• Scalability — export orientation
• Labour intensity — minimum labour requirement, or high local manpower
• Import reduction — whether the project reduces Qatar's reliance on imports of the product

The bank separately describes an internal model for identifying value-added sectors, taking into account export potential, use of new technologies, use of raw materials and environmental impact, and states that the model is documented and applied consistently across direct financing applications.

Read the two lists together and the logic of the unattractive list becomes visible. It is largely the inverse of these criteria: activities with no export dimension, no technology content, no import substitution, and a supply position already met locally.

Where the feasibility study sits

QDB's stated application sequence is to complete the project finance application form, attach the feasibility study for review by one of its advisors, attach the required licences, and — for an established company — provide audited accounts for the last three years.

One line in the published FAQ is worth reading twice: the bank does not apply for any licences on the applicant's behalf. Licensing sits with you and runs on its own timetable, which for a manufacturing project frequently runs longer than the financing decision.

QDB assesses submitted studies against its own business plan scope of work and minimum requirements, and returns comments where a submission falls short of them.

The operative point is that the standard exists in documented form. A study written without reference to it is being marked against a rubric it never saw.

If QDB is not the route

Direct financing is one of several instruments, and an ineligible project is not necessarily an unfinanceable one.

The Credit Guarantee Program is not a direct financing scheme. QDB provides partial guarantee coverage to partner financial institutions so that they will extend financing themselves. Published coverage is typically up to 50 per cent of the financed amount, and up to 70 per cent for low-ticket financing, calculated on sector classification, probability of default, facility size and equity contribution. It covers both operating and capital expenditure. For a business a commercial bank would fund with more comfort behind it, this is the relevant door.

Applications for that route are submitted through the National Funding Gate, the single digital channel QDB launched in November 2025, which is also where the document checklist for the application is published.

The Startup Qatar Investment Program, powered by QDB, is an equity route aimed at tech startups establishing or expanding in Qatar, with funding released against agreed milestones.

The distinction matters when you are choosing what to prepare. A guarantee application runs through a commercial bank's credit process. An equity application is assessed on growth and defensibility rather than on debt service. They are not the same document.

Before you apply

• Check your activity against the List of Unattractive Industries — and read the geographic scope and greenfield columns on the row, not just the row
• Confirm the activity is not within real estate, trading, contracting or construction
• Confirm the application can be submitted under Qatari ownership
• Establish which cost categories your capital expenditure falls into before assuming a funded percentage
• Check whether your licensing timetable is compatible with your financing timetable
• Make sure the study addresses the scored criteria — demand–supply gap, import substitution, export potential — and not profitability alone