My first professional job while working on my Masters in Public Affairs was working for the City of Westminster, Colorado as a Management Intern in the City Manager’s office. I think that is when the “city bug” bit me.  I love cities and as the Knowledge Management and Communications Specialist for the USAID supported CityLinks program, I have really enjoyed using my local government experience and knowledge to help cities in developing and emerging countries around the world address their most pressing problems.

With program staff and project stakeholders we often say that the challenges facing cities are the same around the world – they are just on different scales. Cities everywhere must provide clean water, manage solid waste, balance budgets and other core services.  But imagine you lead a city that is growing rapidly with thousands of people moving there every month – how do you keep providing essential services?

USAID is addressing that question. Last year, USAID released its new urban policy: Sustainable Service Delivery in an Increasingly Urbanized World.  Recognizing the unprecedented growth of cities, it developed guidelines that urban areas can use to improve the delivery of essential public services.

The policy has four development principles:

1. Ensuring political and financial sustainability;
2. Advancing accountable, pro-poor service delivery models;
3. Fostering market orientation and public private collaboration; and
4. Supporting municipal resilience.

These principles were developed to help design programs that improve local accountability and capacity to provide basic services as well as exploring how to improve financing in those cities to improve these urban services. 

So why did USAID create this new policy? Besides rapid urbanization, there were other factors that fueled USAID to develop a new urban policy. They realized that many programs in USAID missions were using urban and urbanization as a lens to help address other challenges such as health, climate change and access to water and sanitation.  Many realized that they could create a greater impact by trying to solve these problems in urban areas – and especially rapidly growing secondary cities.

Bob MacLeod who is Division Chief for the Office of Energy and Infrastructure Engineering and Urban Programs Division also offered that “USAID sees cities as laboratories of innovation that solve problems, share solutions and learn from one another what works.”

Over the coming weeks, ICMA and the CityLinks Team will be posting blogs and sharing resources to further explore these principles and how they can be put into action.  On June 19, CityLinks will host a webinar on the new policy with examples from around the world how cities are learning from each other to address urbanization challenges.  Panelists include:

Jeff Szuchman is the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow and Policy Advisor in the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning at USAID. He was a member of the team that drafted USAID’s policy on Sustainable Urban Service Delivery.

Dr. Sean O’Donoghue is the Manager of the Climate Change Adaptation Branch, for Durban, South Africa.  He has been involved with the CityLinks exchange between Durban and Ft. Lauderdale, FL that focused on devising a regional approach to climate change adaptation.

Tim Campbell, PhD, is the Woodrow Wilson Global Fellow and is the author of Beyond Smart Cities: How Cities Network, Learn and Innovate. He traveled the world researching cities and innovation and has much to share.

Informal settlements in Legazpi City, Philippines

We hope you will contribute to the conversation and share your ideas on urbanization with the hashtag #usaidurban. If you have questions on the urban policy or would like more resources, please contact me at lhagg@icma.org.  To learn more visit our website, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @ICMACityLinks.