At the end of this month, Nairobi will host the Second High-Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC). From 28 November – 2 December, around 3000 delegates will come together to discuss how to improve development co-operation in the 2030 era. The second High Level Meeting will be an important occasion for local governments to provide their insights and contributions. To prepare the UCLG delegation, UCLG and the CIB Working Group have been engaged in several activities in the past months, in order to prepare the constituency towards the second High-Level Meeting
From GPI workshop to the launching of the CIB publication
After UCLG hosted the Global Partnership Initiatives Acceleration workshop – an event aimed at facilitating exchange among voluntary initiatives that were established over the past years to work on innovative approaches and concrete proposals to implement more effective development cooperation – the CIB Working Group continued to work on its own GPI on the involvement of local and regional governments in national development strategies. The results of a survey among local government associations, sent out in December 2015, and consequent in-depth interviews were analysed throughout the summer, leading to a new CIB policy brief, on development effectiveness and local governments. This policy brief was officially launched at the UCLG congress in Bogotá in October and will serve as important input for the second High Level Meeting in Nairobi.
Bogotá: Workshop on shaping national development strategies
The interventions of speakers and the audience during the workshop on shaping the National Development Agendas and the role of local government in effective development, organized by CIB at the congress in Bogotá, also served as important input. The workshop was moderated by the vice-chair of the Development Cooperation and City Diplomacy committee of UCLG, Mayor Ton Rombouts from Den Bosch (The Netherlands). It brought together a multi-stakeholder panel consisting of Mr. Boubacar Alpha Bah, the President of the Association of Municipalities of Mali (AMM; also one of the case studies in the above mentioned publication), UCLG champion and Mayor Berry Vrbanovic, Mrs. Karina Cáceres, on behalf of the CSO Partnership for Development Effectiveness and Mr. Ciro Pérez Silva, second secretary of the Mexican embassy in Colombia. By bringing together both a recipient and sender of development cooperation, the civil society and a representative from Mexico, one of the current co-chairs of the GPEDC, the dialogue gave important insights for Nairobi.
Presence in Nairobi
UCLG and its CIB Working Group are involved in the preparations of three plenary sessions and two side events, with topics ranging from the implementation and localizing of the Sustainable Development Goals, to enabling factors for a true multi-stakeholder environment. In all these events, the UCLG delegation will make sure that the experience form the ground is shared, in order to get the message that local involvement in the design, implementation and monitoring of development cooperation is crucial, across to all actors present.
Please find an explanatory video about the second High Level Meeting here.
For more information about the UCLG-CIB work in the GPEDC, please contact uclg.cib@vng.nl.