We traveled to Kiel, where we captured deep insights from a city that, as a digital champion, had to adapt quickly. How do you keep your StartUp community alive if people cannot meet personally?
More: https://youtu.be/-QxhW-Gx-3M
Join us and watch a special series of videos and podcasts that will show how to overcome a crisis from many different points of view. More videos, podcasts and interviews coming soon on our COVID-19 page.
The exchange was designed to bring together urban practitioners from all over the globe. The goal was to ignite creativity, innovation, solidarity and motivation, while creating and enhancing this global community of practice around the common purpose of combating the global COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences with smart local solutions and strategies.
During the first week, urban practitioners and experts from different municipalities, the civil society, business and academia, presented a total of 56 Good Practices in 18 sessions and gave insights into their experienced challenges and local solutions to deal with the pandemic. The exchange were centered around the nine topics were Public Health, Crisis Management, Economic Response, Housing, Education, Digitalisation, Crisis Communication, Innovation, and Green Urban Recovery.
The second week was about receiving practical “How To” capsules with practical exercises on topics that came up repeatedly during the exchange events such as: social media usage, digital tools, and how to plan for virtual meetings. Finally, the newly learned mindsets and tools could be applied in a 4-hour solution design workshop.
Local Economic Development (LED) remains a top priority for the MENA countries as a driver for economic stability and job creation for a region with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. While many resources are invested in fostering local economic development in the MENA countries led by governments, however, there is often a lack of systematic access to practice-oriented solutions.
More than 40 local urban practitioners from 22 municipalities and 10 countries from the MENA region and Germany took part of the virtual dialogue event organized by the Connective Cities project. The dialogue event consisted of five virtual sessions held between the Sep 29th – Oct 7th 2019, focusing on facilitating the exchange of know-how and experiences through peer-to-peer learning among municipal representatives and urban practitioners. Moreover, the dialogue event aimed at enriching the analysis and planning capacity of the participating municipal representatives to address existing challenges of implementing LED and job creation programs.
Throughout the Dialogue event, participants showed tremendous commitment to the program with a level of excitement that remained high till the last day of the dialogue where they learned how to present their LED project concepts in less than 3 minutes; an activity that reflected their understanding of project development process as well as the peer-to-peer exchange methodology.
This report reflects in detail the main results of the virtual dialogue event.
More than 40 local urban practitioners from 22 municipalities and 10 countries from the MENA region and Germany took part of the virtual dialogue event organized by the Connective Cities project. The dialogue event consisted of five virtual sessions held between the Sep 29th – Oct 7th focusing on facilitating the exchange of know-how and experiences through peer-to-peer learning among municipal representatives and urban practitioners. Moreover, the dialogue event aimed at enriching the analysis and planning capacity of the participating municipal representatives to address existing challenges of implementing LED and job creation programs. The discussion also led to identifying the gaps in resources and the support needed to implement future LED projects.
Local economic development (LED) remains a top priority for cities in MENA and a driver for economic stability and job creation for a region with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. A wide spectrum of stakeholders are engaged in fostering LED including governments, NGOs, the private sector, and development actors. Nevertheless, there remains the need to intensify exchange of practice-oriented experience and good practice among municipal representatives and urban practitioners on related topics such as strategizing for LED and creating partnerships with the private sector, sustainable livelihood programs and decent job creation, as well as green economic transformation.
The facilitation approach focused on designing, planning, and conducting a series of virtual knowledge-exchange activities in which several steps were taken:
The project has built a Network, an exchange platform for municipal representatives and urban practitioners, which provides a systematic access to practice-oriented solutions for sustainable urban development by facilitating change and providing mutual support.
Dialogue event introductory video: English version | Arabic version
More than 15 municipal representatives from around 15 cities in MENA and sub-Sharan Africa participated in the virtual event of the knowledge-exchange series on Municipal Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, which took place on the 14th October 2020.
Municipal representatives from both political and technical levels were invited and they engaged in knowledge-exchange to analyse and discuss practical examples on how innovation contributes to curbing the impacts of the pandemic.
As part of the virtual event, four good practices from Aachen (Germany), Biskra and Batna (Algeria), and Mosul (Iraq) were showcased. The virtual event aimed at facilitating the sharing of experiences of interventions undertaken from a production, innovation, and scientific point of view to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 on cities in MENA and Germany.
Moreover, the following set of questions were addressed:
Fight Corona.AC initiative in RWTH Aachen university, Germany
Prof. Jan Borchers, RWTH Aachen university, Germany
English Arabic
COV-Fight Project in Biskra, Algeria
Mr. Imad Tibermacine, Biskra, Algeria
English Arabic
3D printing technology for the production of medical supplies in Batnah, Algeria
Mr. Belcasem Islam, Batnah, Algeria
English Arabic
Mosul Space in Mosul, Iraq
Ms. Susan Long, Innovation Lead for Middle East at Field Ready
Mr. Salih Mahmod, Mosul Space
English Arabic
The showcasing of good practices resulted in an opportunity for cooperation between the innovation hub in Mosul, Iraq and Algerian good practices. Connective Cities will facilitate this cooperation.
Topics: Public Health & Crisis Management / Economy, Housing & Education / Digitalisation & Communication / Innovation
Time: 23 November – 3 December 2020
Cities worldwide are severely affected by the impacts of COVID-19. Unlike national governments, municipalities are in close contact with their citizens and are responsible for the implementation of measures decided by governments to reduce the spread of Corona infections.
Cities worldwide also have collected important experiences, which will be of immense relevance in the global fight against the virus. The crisis has shown how important the resilience of municipalities is: this directly applies to local crisis management and disaster preparedness as well as to the need for constantly adaptive urban planning. The current crisis has shown and proven once again that resilience is an essential capacity of municipalities.
To continue tackling the challenges of the pandemic in the future and to find suitable solutions to minimise its negative impact, it is now necessary to learn from and share experiences that will support the joint development of further measures. In the framework of its COVID-19 Municipal response dialogue, Connective Cities is organising a virtual global exchange series on “Municipal Response to COVID-19” from 23 November to 3 December 2020 and kindly invites you to be part of this series of events. This international exchange effort takes place in cooperation with engaged urban practitioners, municipal experts as well as local experts from academia, civil society and business.
The transport sector is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions at present. It accounts for approximately one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and hence figures prominently in efforts to transform the energy economy and protect the climate. Without a scaled-up global mitigation effort, it will not be possible to reach the climate targets of the Paris Agreement. A low-carbon transformation of the global transport sector is the next necessary step in the global energy transformation.
Germany’s Federal Foreign Office has commissioned the project “T4<2° – Transport for under two degrees”, a global foresight study on the decarbonisation and transformation of the transport sector to identify challenges and opportunities for a sustainable, low-carbon transport sector. The findings provide decision-makers with a clear vision and specific recommendations on how to achieve decarbonisation of the sector and orchestrate international efforts for a global transport system transformation.
The crisis inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered many initiatives around the world to employ innovative solutions that aim at impeding the spread of the virus and curbing its disastrous impacts.
Examples of these impactful innovations include shift labs, remote screening and monitoring of patients, DIY face shields, low-cost ventilators, and the mobilisation of 3-D printing and robotics to manufacture vital medical devices or test kits. Overall, the registered progress at this front has highlighted the underlying and more critical long-term need to better resource and institutionalize strategic innovation in rebuilding local capacities of the health and economic sectors. Some expert opinions advocate for greater investments in developing platforms for diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics as a means to overcome the huge economic toll of this pandemic. Similarly, supporting and funding highly innovative start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs is crucial to the economy’s fast recovery.
Given the urgency for innovative solutions to the pandemic, sharing existing and emerging breakthrough achievements is of utter importance. Sharing and disseminating such knowledge can potentially facilitate the creation of partnerships which in turn are pivotal to initiating strategic and operational response to the short-term challenges resulting from COVID-19, as well as to the long-term planning for recovery.
To this end, this virtual knowledge-exchange event showcases ongoing grassroot initiatives developed collaboratively by local and national entities, research institutions and the private sector. In particular, FIGHTCORONA.AC initiative1 from Aachen (Germany), COV-Fight project2 from Biskra (Algeria), as well as the good practice of using 3D-printing technology for the production of medical supplies3 in Batnah (Algeria) will be presented.
Language: English and Arabic.
Date: 14th October 2020
Time: 13:00 – 14:45 CEST
More Informationen: Programme [pdf]
If you have any queries about the event and the participation process, we encourage you to contact
Muna Shalan, Connective Cities’ regional coordinator for MENA: muna.shalan@giz.de
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a deteriorating impact on the national and local government economic resources. In economies that largely depend on informal labour market, a lot of people have lost their livelihoods. The governments have been torn between life and livelihoods as the interaction of people propels the spread of the virus.
This shift affected the revenue stream for the local government especially in the cities as a result of shrinking businesses and also a mass migration of the urban population to the rural areas. This has a negative impact on effective operations of the municipalities and service provision.
Whilst the impact of this pandemic has been felt worldwide, cities have responded with different measures to avert the spread and cushion against long-term impacts and even future pandemics. It’s against this background that Connective Cities1 is offering a platform in which cities will share the challenges they have experienced and interventions that have either been implemented or are being planned to safeguard against the negative impacts and future pandemics.
In the second series at10th & 12th November, 2020, 13:00- 15:00 (CET), we look at the economic impact of the pandemic, recovery and resilience of cities.
Conference language is English.
More information:Concept paper [pdf 3 pages]
If you have further questions or would like to participate, please send an e-mail to Sophia Kamau (sophia.kamau@giz.de), Regional Coordinator for Connective Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.
More than 30 municipal representatives from around 20 cities in MENA and sub-Sharan Africa participated in the third virtual event of the knowledge-exchange series on Municipal Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Municipal representatives from both political and technical levels were invited and they engaged in knowledge-exchange to analyse and discuss practical examples of municipal response related to cushioning and the recovery from the economic impacts of the pandemic.
