Urbis is working with a number of organizations in the focus cities. Together with these organizations, Urbis has designed and implemented training programs tailor-made to the organization’s specific needs. These jointly-developed programs include expert consulting that best responds to training goals, as well as networking activities to help the organizations scale-up the impact of their work. Also, to maximize Urbis’s learning impact, this on-line Community of Practice aims to connect urban development practitioners around the world.
Based on the results from DIG’s diagnostics conducted in twelve cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Urbis capacity building is focusing on the following areas:
- Advocacy
- Slum improvement
- Better provision of services (water, sanitation)
- Land tenure regularization
- Financing for the urban poor
- Economic growth
More contextual explanations of these issues can be found in the descriptions of the Urbis work in the cities.
Urbis is employing the following capacity building approaches in working on the above issues:
- The Urbis team has observed an almost universal need and interest among urban pro-poor organizations for capacity building in organizational management, particularly resource mobilization and financial management. These areas, therefore, are a core focus of the first approach to capacity building: the provision of classroom courses in Sao Paulo through the ESPASO curriculum. In other locations, such as Phnom Penh, the partner pro-poor organizations will access training courses offered from local providers.
- As an example of the second approach, in Phnom Penh, Urbis is providing technical assistance for specific and customized capacity building in a variety of areas, including web page design and maintenance, newsletters, television and radio spots, and the production of audio-visual materials. In Dhaka, Urbis is conducting group workshops on land planning and tenure, land sharing, and participatory disaster mitigation.
- Long-term sustained on-site technical assistance is an approach used to build more substantial capacity in specific areas of a pro-poor organization. In these cases, Urbis hires experts for secondment to beneficiary organizations for the time necessary to build the identified capacity.
For example, a partner organization could be assigned an expert to incorporate geographic information into urban and slum area surveys and research projects. Organizations could also be provided sustained on-site technical assistance to work with beneficiaries to assist in community organizing and economic development initiatives for the organization and the community at large.
- Study tours offer a flexible tool to exchange best practices and to learn about successful peer efforts. These can be at the national level, as in Mombasa where a study tour will be organized to visit a neighboring municipality (Malindi) to learn about its effective use of a council-community partnership. Additionally, in Dhaka, we will have in-country study tours for our partner to learn from other slum dwellers in Bangladesh, primarily related to successful group savings methods, community-based enterprises, and community-managed enterprises.
Study tours can also be conducted internationally; for example, Luanda, which is currently undergoing a process of government decentralization, has organized a study tour to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in order to expose relevant and instructive relationships between civil society and the government.
