Some of the good practice examples were presented at the Connective Cities international dialogue event on lessons learned during the coronavirus crisis. These inspired the roughly 800 participants from 250 municipalities worldwide to see how they could improve their responses to COVID-19.
Municipalities the world over are on the front line of the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all, they have to maintain basic public services. Public health officers must organise tests and vaccinations, and public order offices need to monitor contact restrictions. Child day-care centres and schools must be largely kept running; public transport companies have to adapt to changed user behaviour, waste management utilities to different quantities of waste, and so on and so forth.
As a result, municipalities have been facing huge challenges for months. Many are overstretched, and often lack not just human resources and modern digital equipment, but also points of reference for how they might tackle the problems. On the other hand, since March municipalities have been generating countless ideas on how to cope with the pandemic as best they can. Some are falling back on crisis plans which they drew up years ago for disaster preparedness. Others are pursuing innovative paths, such as the Municipality of Hazmieh in Lebanon, which is relying amongst other things on geographic information systems to contain the pandemic, or Batnah in Algeria, where coronavirus-related medical products are being manufactured using 3D printers.
Sharing lessons learned internationally
To enable these examples to be replicated rather than remaining one-off solutions, from June 2020 onwards, and on behalf of Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Connective Cities gave local actors an opportunity to share their experiences with the pandemic in a simple and flexible way. This led to the ‚Municipal Responses to COVID-19‘ series of events.
Just as the pandemic does not stop at borders, the expert dialogue on COVID-19 was designed to be international too. 256 municipalities from eleven countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America took part in 51 online events. All participants wanted to learn from and with each other, and improve their responses to the pandemic and their resilience – entirely in line with the ‚build back better‘ principle
