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Tool

Overarching levers for municipal financing

In 2021, UN-Habitat conducted an initiative of increasing financial capacities of cities from developing countries to deliver productive and sustainable urban development. Main findings have been summarized in a policy brief that focuses on three levers for increasing municipal funding and financing: improving investment planning, raising local revenues, and enhancing access to external finance.

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Goal

Help urban stakeholders, also those not directly responsible for making budgeting decisions, to understand the three overarching goals for municipal financing, and to identify areas of intervention in their municipality.

Tasks

Step 1. Make participants familiar with the recommendations for improving investment planning, raising local revenues, and enhancing access to external finance from the policy brief . You can print out posters available or policy brief print-outs, and design this step either as silent work for each participant, or as groups divided in each of the goals

Step 2. In groups, or in plenary discussion, depending on the number of participants, discuss about what each goal mean for you city/municipality. Participants should collect concrete action ideas of what they could start dong, or identify challenges regarding that specific goal, and how to deal with the challenges – in a group consensus, participants can also jointly prioritize the actions

Step 3. Categorize actions prioritized under shot, medium and long term, responsible units within the city administration and also other stakeholder to be involved, and support needed from these stakeholders

Materials

Slides and poster (step 1), templates for visualising discussion (step 2) and template for visualising agreements and next steps (Step 3), all here

Note

Can be used in combination with other financing tools. As a step 0, you can self-assess existing financing options here: https://localising-global-agendas.org/plan-for-action/good-practice-collection/

Also interesting to be done when more cities are doing the exercise, with steps in between to share the findings and joint learning

Timeframe

3 to 6 hours

Output

Prioritized list of specific actions and initial information to start implementing them

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