Urbis: The Urban Capacity Laboratory is a three-year learning initiative launched in September 2007 by the Development Innovations Group to strengthen the capacity and strategic growth of carefully selected pro-poor organizations. It also seeks to guide future decisions regarding how to invest most effectively in strategies to combat urban poverty by answering the following key questions:
- What types of institutions enable the urban poor to increase their ability to influence decision-making and planning processes that affect them?
- What types of institutions respond more effectively to targeted capacity building initiatives?
- What types of capacity building initiatives are most effective to increase these organizations’ ability to serve their constituencies in a streamlined and cost-effective manner?
- What roles do demographic and political contexts play in the success of capacity building efforts targeting these organizations?
- What are the factors of scale and replicability that enable Urbis to be taken to scale or replicated elsewhere?
We are currently implementing capacity building projects with local partners in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Casablanca (Morocco), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Durban (South Africa), Luanda (Angola), Mombasa (Kenya), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Sao Paulo (Brazil).
