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Home » Focus Areas » Promotion of participatory urban planning, management and governance » Activities » Up-scaling Poverty-focused City Development Strategies in the Philippines
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Partner: Local Authorities: League of Cities of the Philippines
International Organizations: Cities Alliance, World Bank, UN-HABITAT |
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Cost: US$50,000 |
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In 1999/2000, seven cities in the Philippines prepared a City Development Strategy (CDS) with the assistance of the World Bank-managed Cities Alliance (which was funded by the Government of Japan) concurrent with UNDP/UN-HABITAT support to three cities. Together these cities formed the resource base for disseminating the lessons learned to 31 other cities in the Philippines, supported by the League of Cities of the Philippines which advocated for a change in urban management practices. In the process the project aimed to build the capacity of the League's City Liaison Officers to deliver innovative management approaches - such as the preparation of pro-poor Environmental Management and City Development Strategies. The objective of this project was to share the technical knowledge, management tools and field-level experiences of UN-HABITAT and the World Bank with the League and its partner cities.
The inception period of the project involved selecting participating cities, preparing a detailed work plan, and conducting the first national workshop in November 2001. A League of Cities support team was established with counterpart cross-sectoral teams in each partner city and environmental, poverty and governance profiles were prepared for each city. These issues were discussed with all key stakeholders in "City Visioning" workshops when the comparable strengths and weaknesses of cities, many of which are in each other's competitive "space", were reviewed. Most recently all cities prepared their City Development Strategies, which were reviewed by the League of Cities team. An important capacity-building tool developed in early 2001 was a "knowledge management platform" which is accessible through the Internet. This has very successfully provided the partner cities with an organized knowledge resource centre on the project that includes basic data and tools.
City Profiles, City Visions and City Development Strategies have been successfully completed for all 31 cities through city teams supported by small but strategic external inputs. 13 cities successfully completed their pro-poor financing action plans. As of February 2004 US$ 46 million had been mobilized for a variety of priority projects in 10 cities. A customized City Development Strategy Approach and supporting Toolkit is available online to facilitate national replication and further integration of lessons learned into national policy dialogue and legislative reform. As a result local ownership of the process, the success rate of the project has been very high, with demand for a follow-up phase to support a long list of cities which did not benefit from this second round, to be supported by a follow-up project currently under preparation. |
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