Collaborative Urban Futures Innovative Partnership Models for Development
November 7, 2024 | 13:00 - 14:30
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Summary
Cities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) face rapid urbanization, climate change, and growing inequalities, leading to uneven development and unplanned urban growth. Despite these challenges, cities can serve as hubs for fostering behavioral change and addressing socio-economic and environmental issues collectively. By promoting dialogue and partnerships, cities in LMICs can drive innovation and collaborative solutions, paving the path towards a sustainable and inclusive urban future.
Partnerships for urban development are crucial for tackling the complex challenges of fast-growing cities. These collaborations unite diverse stakeholders, enhancing communication for efficient resource management and maximizing impact. By integrating policymaking, financial investments, technology, and human capital, partnerships promote holistic and sustainable urban solutions. This panel explores two innovative partnership models designed to advance effective urban futures.
The first partnership model, the Egypt Impact Lab (EIL), is a collaboration between the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in the Middle East and North Africa and Egypt’s Ministry of Planning and Economic Development (MPED). EIL is a governance model that works on generating scientific evidence, building the government's capacity to use evidence, and strengthening knowledge ecosystems to enable policy influence. With two decades of experience, J-PAL has a strong track record of building institutional partnerships to co-generate evidence that influences policy and ensures localized development action. EIL addresses the government’s priorities clustered under four thematic areas; Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation, Employment and MSME Development, Women Empowerment and Family Development, and Environment, Energy, and Climate Change. EIL presents a localized governance model that supports institutional change towards using evidence in informing policy and program decisions, and evaluation findings are operationalized into localized action.
The second partnership model exhibits digital solutions to transform cities' trajectories into engines of national development and social mobility. Through the Co-designing Urban Futures initiative, Connected Places Catapult, GSMA, and UN-Habitat came together to develop a methodology based on a challenge-driven innovation model. This model seeks to support intermediary cities by co-creating digital solutions for climate-resilient service delivery that complement public sector institutions with innovative solutions developed by innovators /SMEs around the world. Long-term benefits for cities and the residents involve better collaboration among multiple stakeholders in a city context, building stronger digital capacities of institutions in smaller cities, increased public participation, and scaling financing for innovative solutions in intermediary city contexts. This model is now embarking on implementation in Rwanda and Kenya.
Objectives
The objective of this panel discussion is to discuss the effective partnerships that facilitate a sustainable urban future, embodied in the localized governance initiative EIL and the Co-Designing Urban Futures initiative. The panel will delve into the innovative models of both initiatives and their efforts to inform policymaking through digital solutions and scientific evidence to maximize efficient resource allocation and impactful program implementations.
The panel discussion will aim to;
Facilitate policy dialogues addressing the interconnected challenges of urban development, governance, and poverty in LMIC to advance progress towards Sustainable Development Goals; Share lessons learned from collaborating with governmental institutions and stakeholders that area scaling and implementing innovative solutions in LMICs; Highlight the key objectives of the Co-Designing Urban Futures initiative and the Egypt Impact Lab’s initiative; Disseminate evidence-based solutions derived from J-PAL's extensive research on service provision, socio-economic empowerment, and climate action to support the achievement of relevant SDGs; Present a novel framework for how to assess innovation capacity in intermediary cities across LMICs and demonstrate how digital solutions can catalyze urban development; Enable collaborations among policymakers, development practitioners, start-ups, and academic researchers in the fields of urban expansion, digital solutions, and poverty.