Collaborative Urban Futures Innovative Partnership Models for Development

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.