CoM SSA supports cities to access clean and resilient energy, lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduce costs and boost employment. The best part: these cities do not need their own investment.
At the Climate Action Summit, it is widely acknowledged that cities are key in addressing climate change. Yet, sufficient funding for necessary measures is often hard to come by. Barbara Buchner presents some new and promising approaches of mobilising finance for building resilient urban infrastructure.
UN-Habitat's municipal finance programme is witnessing an exciting evolution in Kenya that offers lessons for local governments worldwide. Marco Kamiya, UN-Habitat’s Chief of the Urban Economy and Finance Branch describes the challenges cities face in their efforts to advance the sustainable development agenda.
UN-Habitat's municipal finance programme is witnessing an exciting evolution in Kenya that offers lessons for local governments worldwide. Marco Kamiya, UN-Habitat’s Chief of the Urban Economy and Finance Branch describes the challenges cities face in their efforts to advance the sustainable development agenda.
Contracting is an unacknowledged superpower that cities have at their disposal to ensure high-quality service delivery to their citizens. Kathrin Frauscher explains how to go about it.
The SNG-WOFI initiative collects comparable data on national, subnational, regional, and municipal government finance flows in order to enable informed and targeted policy-making. Following are the latest key findings of the Observatory as presented at its international conference on June 17, 2019 in Paris, France, summarised for URBANET by Isabelle Chatry, Senior Policy Analyst at the OECD.
Enabling participatory democracy is the goal of South Africa's online platform Grassroot, where community members get together to change their municipalities for the better – with considerable success, as Katlego Mohlabane, outreach and campaigns coordinator at Grassroot, illustrates with examples from Mnandini and Mzondi.
With the sectors for development and finance closely intertwined, a municipality's financing mechanism of choice significantly influences its development path. Khady Sarr, Programme Director of the Dakar Municipal Finance Programme, outlines several models and explains the advantages of bond loans – for municipalities and investors alike.
Many people around the globe struggle with finance management and debt. Michael Ochieng Nyawino describes why it is important to teach everyone financial literacy skills to tackle the problem.
Savings and Credit Cooperative Organisations play a key role for housing security in Kenya. Davina Wood explains how they work and discusses benefits and current challenges.
Revenue from building rights, or land value capture, plays an important role for municipal finance. Martim O. Smolka and Camila Maleronka report on the specific challenges and achievements in the city of São Paulo.
Urban land offers governments in developing countries a vital opportunity for self-financing development. While authorities often see these taxes as administratively burdensome and politically impossible, this doesn’t have to be the case.
