The City of Malmö was committed to sustainability issues long before 2015, the year when the UN assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals. As early as 2008, the partnership collaboration between Malmö and Swakopmund, Namibia was established. Over the years the partnership has generated several interesting projects on the theme of sustainability.
In the projects ‘Awareness III Local Sustainable Marine Food’ & ‘Awareness III Urban gardening’, the City of Malmö and the municipality of Swakopmund worked towards the fulfilment of goal 14 of Agenda 2030, concerning sustainable use of marine resources and locally grown food. Within the framework of the project, the partners achieved increased knowledge through a number of training initiatives. In Swakopmund, the partners worked with capacity building efforts with special attention to breaking gender-stereotypical patterns in the fishing industry. In Malmö, the partners focused on increasing the marine literacy municipality’s staff and the citizens.
If you wish to hear more about the joint collaboration within urban gardening, two interesting short videos have been made. Listen to Robeam Ujaha, explaining how the development of a Community Garden and the Urban Agriculture Project have continued beyond the initial project year.
The partnership between the City of Malmö and Swakopmund Municipality has also been the subject of a study published in the academic journal Sustainability: We Learnt a Lot: Challenges and Learning Experiences in a Southern African—North European Municipal Partnership on Education for Sustainable Development. The purpose of the study was to deepen the understanding of the different parts of a municipal partnership: challenges, the processes required to solve the challenges and learning objectives.
Source: ICLD