Urban

Jinja Mayor Majid Batambuze challenged experts at Habitat III to come up with innovative ways for his city to implement the UN’s New Urban Agenda. Hosted by Rubbina Karruna, Cities Adviser at DFID, the session was designed and facilitated by ICED Urban team to explore the proposition that African secondary cities can act as linchpins […]

Infrastructure and cities programming provide critical opportunities to boost economic growth. However, infrastructure provision and urban development alone are not enough to ensure that economic growth benefits the poor and marginalised. The design and implementation of programmes need to be conceived and put in place with purposeful planning for inclusive approaches.

Do ‘smart cities’ bear relevance in the burgeoning cities of the global south? Basic infrastructure and service provision shortfalls faced by many southern cities present a challenging context for ‘smart’ solutions; and certainly contrasting to those of many existing ‘smart cities.’

DFID has placed trade firmly on the economic development agenda, with the objective of harnessing the potential of new trade relationships to boost job creation and investment to the world’s poorest countries.

The ICED facility has undertaken an analysis of Zimbabwe’s urban trends for DFID’s Zimbabwe country office. This analysis was done in order to better understand urban trends and dynamics in Zimbabwe which can inform future urban programming.

For a long time, governments have seen street vendors, waste pickers and other informal activities as a headache and lost tax revenue opportunity. Efforts to formalise the informal economy and bring it under regulation have often failed, not just due to its sheer size, but also stemming from a lack of understanding of the political […]

In December, the ICED facility hosted a number of Quarterly Lessons Learnt (QLL) sessions. This quarter we shared learnings and hosted discussion from Urban Research Nigeria. Attached are slides from the session. What makes an effective city in a challenging environment? Nigeria has a long history of urbanisation and urban development that distinguishes it from […]

Whilst digital solutions on their own cannot provide a silver bullet to youth unemployment, when viewed as part of a suite of approaches to tackling this issue, digital-focused interventions also have great potential to support the development of a vibrant, valuable youth workforce. Such interventions should be complemented by support in areas such as education […]

There are growing opportunities to utilise digital solutions to solve urban service delivery challenges. Opportunities  include the potential to better plan services for citizens, improving the value for money of LGAs investments an leveraging private sector support. In 2017 the ICED programme developed a positioning paper ‘Urbanisation in a Digital World’, reviewed the potential for […]