Match-Maker Albania 2026: Albania Showcases Business and Investment Opportunities

For the second consecutive year in Tirana, Match-Maker Albania is taking place, having established itself as a strategic meeting point for investors, companies, and both domestic and international institutions. With over 1,000 participants and more than 400 scheduled meetings, organized by the Albanian Investment Development Agency (AIDA), the event will promote Albania as a reliable and innovative destination for investment.

At the opening ceremony, Prime Minister Edi Rama praised the role of Albanian youth and the dedication of the AIDA team in developing the Match-Maker platform. He underlined the country’s progress and emphasized that Albania has become an increasingly attractive destination for international investors.

The Prime Minister also highlighted Albania’s transformation from a country with limited resources and seasonal tourism into an open and diversified economy, with Albanian exports now reaching approximately 100 countries worldwide.

***

Prime Minister Edi Rama: Thank you to everyone that has come here from other countries and destinations and thank you to everyone that is here representing the Albanian community of entrepreneurs. I want to make sure that everyone knows that the dog that opened this session is made in Albania and it’s the work of an amazing team of talented young Albanians that I hope will do more and will be of great benefit for our new military industry too. So, thank you.

Talking about this event, I want to quote a late friend, famous Albanian writer Mojkom Zeqo, who in a work dedicated to the history of the Church of Labova of the Cross, it’s a beautiful church near to Gjirokastra, wrote about the St. Mary’s Fair, organized at that time under the direct supervision of Justinian in the 6th century.

One day before the fair, traveling merchants would arrive from Gjirokastra and Libohova, trading handcrafts and food products at the place known as Lemi Valleve. Buyers, the 10,000-12,000 pilgrims, would spend three nights of prayer inside the church. And later, fairs have always become a way to tell stories. It was in this very same place where the first fair after the fall of the communist regime opened, Fiera del Levante. At the onset of the 30s this connection originated, but it needed then more than 50 years to get it back. During the very first fair of Levante in the 30s, Albania tried to put on the markets of tourism her thermal springs and few agricultural products and textiles. Then, in the renewed fair of Levante, we saw the beginning of a new story, that started with cheap labor, as poverty itself was an advantage to attract foreigners looking for a place to outsource their activities.

So, this country became the place where the various Valentinos and Dolce Gabbana and many others found their lucrative paradise of very, very cheap labor thanks to amazing, dedicated women. But then Albania entered in a new phase, followed by mystery box fairs, ready to be explored as an exotic promise. And here we come today. It’s a different age. It’s a different generation of entrepreneurship. It’s a different time for us as it is for the world.

The great thing is that today, Albania reflects the new time of the world. And this matchmaker, just a few weeks ago, the biggest tourism fair in the world in Berlin, talks about Albania as no longer a land of promise for a better tomorrow, but as a country where everyone should investigate and everyone should jump in as there is no tomorrow, ready to welcome, ready to offer, ready to build an ecosystem around the investor needs and ready to connect people, businesses, ambitions.

Matchmaker started as a success story thanks to this great person and ambitious individual who is leading the agency, AIDA. And I want to thank her and to thank her team for having created this agency on a different level. But it’s fair to say that they can do it because they have a lot of things that they can show.

Nowadays it’s much easier than it was to have people come to Albania and to have people be back to Albania. This fair is focused on four fields which reflect, as a matter of fact, the very essence of the change that our economic model has brought.

First is, of course, tourism and modern urban projects. Albania, from being a country of adventure tourism for just one or two months a year and for a limited number of people, is now a country where some of the biggest changes are happening, not just in terms of number, but also in terms of a very diverse portfolio of opportunities that goes from the very individual tourists that like to get lost in the mountaintops to the big groups of tourists that like to come and explore our capital city, our seaside, our valleys, our lakes, our villages, our agrotourism and so on and so further.

So, this is the place, by no doubt. And we are very, very happily looking that not just our ambition, but also the ambition of them who investigate Albania as a land of opportunities is growing by the day. We are preparing to launch some very big investments that go in the range of billions and billions and that aim to promote not just touristic destinations of Albania but a tourism of a different profile, of a different quality, of a different level of understanding and of caring about sustainability.

The second pillar is smart agriculture that looks like still a challenging field, but where a lot is happening and where a lot of made in Albania is developing quite fast, Albanian products now reach the tables of around 100 countries across the world and we strongly believe that our objective to bring the exports of this small country in a billion of euros is in our reach.

The third field is digital horizons, technology, artificial intelligence, cyber security, digital economy and we are very proud to be the first country that has even left space in the government for an AI minister. And she is doing very well by the way, and she is preparing to come back to the attention with some great news.

We are very well aware that digitalization represents for us the blessing, as for every country that is developing, because it’s a unique opportunity to leapfrog ahead and close in a very short time quite historical gaps that otherwise would have never been possible to be closed in the range of time of a generation or two.

And finally, least but not last at all, the energy. From a sector that has been associated for so long time with limitations, with instability, with dependence on natural conditions, it is becoming a sector associated with investment, with diversification, long-term vision and innovation. As the Minister mentioned, we are very proudly diversifying our portfolio of energy production, and we are very steadily going towards a great ambitious goal of full sovereignty towards a time and the future that nothing is any more easily predictable.

So, we believe that within this decade, Albania will be fully sovereign and will guarantee by itself all the production needed for itself. And guess what? 100% renewable. So, when people talk about Albania, sometimes they fall easily for some steel stereotypes like corruption, organized crime, etc. Albania is not about that. We have no more corruption than everyone else, no more organized crime than everyone else. And I’m not going to mention here ports in Europe, starting from ours, but going to some bigger ones. I’m not going to mention here turnovers in Europe about drugs.

I’m not going to mention here quantities of networks, of traffickers, of criminals in Europe. I’m not going to make any comparison. This is not to say that we are better than anyone else, but to everyone that says that we are worse, I say, look at yourself and let us do our job and let us become better. And we are doing it and we are becoming every day better.

And today, as a testament to change, we have moved from a country with few months of tourism, few millions of tourists, 300 to 400 million for indirect investment, to a country with much more months of tourism, with 12 million tourists and with 1.6 billion foreign direct investment per year.

It doesn’t look to me like a country that is suffering from corruption and from organized crime. It looks to me like a country that is living behind corruption and organized crime. And this is fact.

So, I would very happily make here a secret vote. It’s not possible to do, but I would very happily do it. I’d make a secret vote for all foreign investors coming to Albania, working with Albania or working in Albania. And I would put a very simple question: “Did you have an experience of corruption?” And I aim for 90% “No”. It’s not bad. It’s very good. And we are going to go for the 100%. But everyone that sings this song every day and again should take a break. Please.

To finish, I want to say that in 1935, the Minerva magazine of one of the first women publishers, whose name was Ikbale Cika, not easy to pronounce but beautifully said in Albanian,

Published with pride, the Albanian stands at Fiera del Levante through a special reportage directly from Bari. At the center of that time-charmed offensive of Albania was the black and white picture of a homemade rakija. And in fact, I believe it was a great strategy to use a little bit of spirits, a little of emotional pitch, to invite Italians from the other side of the Adriatic to come and to get drunk much easier than with their beautiful wine.

So, today at the government stand you will not find just rakija, but you will find some rakija. So, although it’s no longer needed to cheer up your spirits when you come to Albania, try it, it will make Albania look even better. But what is the great effect of it?  It will make everyone cheer up and not suffer artificially for our problems with corruption and organized crime. So, a lot more is to be said today, but I’m going to stop here because my speech was already long enough in respect of my habits.

I want to thank again everyone that has come to visit here. There are some people here that would not be present not many years ago because Albania would be too much a risk for them.

I want to mention especially some guys who I respect infinitely for their capacity to make due diligence, for their patience to make strategy, for their prudence that is one of a kind. Of course, they come from Germany. The guys of Lidl that are here are working with us. Soon we will open their first facility. And as someone said to me, when the Germans come, then you are really in a different level.

So, thank you very much.