While Berlin has become the vibrant hub of the German start-up scene, Jakarta is on the way to becoming a city 4.0. In other words, a smart city with intelligent concepts for mobility, housing, environmental management and good governance. In future, the two municipalities want to step up their cooperation and learn more from each other.

One of the linchpins of this city-to-city cooperation is Kariem El-Ali who works for the partnership as an integrated expert through Experts for municipal partnerships worldwide (FKPW). The FKPW programme is being implemented jointly by the Service Agency Communities in One World (SKEW) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH under a commission from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

In 2019, Berlin and Jakarta successfully applied for funding from the European Union under its Partnerships for Sustainable Cities programme, enabling them to leverage up to EUR 3.5 million in EU resources for their smart city and start-up activities through to 2022. Together with actors from Berlin and Jakarta, Kariem El-Ali and his team are currently planning an innovation hub in Jakarta – geared specifically to start-ups – that will assist companies in developing innovative services and technologies.

The test phase for a location-based digital marketing tool for Jakarta’s municipal administration is already underway, too. Working with a company in Berlin, Jakarta wants to make its public agencies more visible on online. One goal is to enable citizens to use web-based maps to get more precise digital information about public institutions.

Kariem El-Ali has now been in Jakarta for more than a year. During this time, the two cities have mapped out a detailed agenda for their partnership over the years ahead. El-Ali and his team have already got the ball rolling in a number of areas – for example the virtual hackathon in July 2020 in response to the global COVID-19 crisis. Driving this event is the desire to forge innovative solutions and concepts that could help resolve current challenges. The hope is to develop new ideas that Jakarta’s municipal administration can embed in its programmes.

El-Ali continues to have a special position as an employee in the municipal administration. ‘A lot of my colleagues are surprised that I’ve been here for so long. It’s been almost two years now,’ he says. Everyone, however, has been enthusiastic about the idea of engaging so intensively with an integrated expert as part of the municipal partnership. It is a model example of how municipal partnerships can work towards a sustainable and innovative future.

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‘Engaging in exchange with other cities is the best way for municipalities to learn new skills. And that is particularly true of Industry 4.0, which is digitalising municipal public service delivery.’

Yudi Hermawan, Manager of the Sub-Division for Municipal Partnerships in Jakarta City Government

Developing innovative concepts together – that’s integral to the municipal partnership 4.0 between Berlin and Jakarta. And it calls for a particularly good network grounded in trust, which all comes together on site with Kariem El-Ali. It’s not always digital but that’s precisely why it’s very smart.’

Thyra Knauer, Berlin Senate Chancellery