The direct amidation reaction between carboxylic acids and amines is one of the most common processes employed in the synthesis of organic molecules in both academic and industrial organisations. It remains a highly inefficient reaction, however, due to the widespread use of stoichiometric activating agents that leads to the generation of high molecular weight byproducts as well as increased solvent use during both work-up and purification. There has consequently been considerable interest in recent years in the development of catalytic direct amidation reactions which enable amides to be produced from carboxylic acids and amines with a molecule of water as the only stoichiometric by-product. Common catalytic systems include those based around boronic acids, 2 boric acid derivatives 3 or boron heterocycles, 4 as well as salts of the group(IV) metals titanium, zirconium or hafnium. However, to date these catalytic amidation methods have failed to become widely adopted. This is partly due to the fact that they cannot often be applied to common amide targets which incorporate polar functional groups such as heterocyclic rings. It is also a consequence of the poor efficiency of many catalytic amidation reactions due to the large quantities of solvents employed both in the reaction itself and in the work-up procedure. The use of molecular sieves to efficiently remove water from the reaction mixture exacerbates these problems as higher dilution reaction conditions are normally required, along with excess solvent during work-up for washing the molecular sieves to recover the amide product. For larger scale reactions, Dean-Stark water removal is employed as this is considerably more efficient in terms of solvent usage and scalability, and there are a few reports of direct amidation reactions catalysed by boric acid or simple boronic acids being employed on an industrial scale. The solvents used for catalytic amidation reactions are typically aromatic hydrocarbons (toluene, 2a,3a fluorobenzene 2b ), chlorinated solvents ) or ethers (Et2O, 5d THF, CPME, 3e TAME 3g-3h ), and these are often suboptimal from a safety and/or sustainability perspective. In addition, these relatively non-polar solvents do not effectively solubilise many polar functionalised carboxylic acids or amines.