Abstract
Ever more critical since mid-2008, when more than half the world’s population was first recorded as living in cities, effective urban development is key to advancing the public health and global development as a whole. Yet no proven solutions exist to meet this burgeoning set of challenges. This is an era of experimentation, with many, largely single-sector approaches, most of which attempt to implement ideas and technologies developed elsewhere to meet quite specific needs on the ground. This chapter examines one integrated, bottom-up approach that both helps cities determine their most urgent priorities and the costs of meeting them and adapts or develops targeted interventions aimed at addressing each city’s needs in the areas of public health, water and sanitation, education, gender parity, private sector development, and urban planning and design.
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Notes
- 1.
This target was conceivable because of commitments made in 2005 by the Group of Eight, or G8, a regularly convening body of governments including what used to be the world’s largest economies: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Russia. At its annual summit that year in Gleneagles, Scotland, the G8 promised $25 billion more per year to help the sub-Saharan region, deemed the furthest off-track, attain the MDGs on time. Due to a sluggish uptake of these promises, however, followed several years later by the global economic crisis, that much-needed assistance by and large has not come through. The G8 has since been supplanted by the Group of 20 (G20), as a more inclusive body more accurately representing emerging economic powerhouses and the global economy.
- 2.
World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. New York: UN Population Division, 2010.
- 3.
The UN Millennium Project, led by Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Earth Institute Director and UN Special Advisor on the MDGs to then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, assembled some 260 scientists worldwide into 13 Task Forces to determine how each of the MDGs, and the targets within each overall goal, could best be achieved. UN Millennium Project officials, and more recently, UN Development Programme (UNDP) officials, then applied this knowledge to national-level planning in ten sub-Saharan countries and elsewhere. A number of these Millennium Project Task Forces devised these extremely useful need assessments, costing instruments, and sets of recommendations, enabling participating Millennium Project countries to understand precisely how far they need to go to attain each goal and the relative cost of doing so.
- 4.
MCI has produced industrial infrastructure surveys for the Millennium Cities of Blantyre, Malawi; Kisumu, Kenya; and Kumasi, Ghana. All of these are available on the MCI website, at www.mci.ei.columbia.edu.
- 5.
In some cases, as in Malawi, this lack of clarity can be attributed in part to the prosecution and penalization of home deliveries, an unanticipated outcome of an aspirational law unmatched at the time it entered into effect.
- 6.
The Kisumu household survey for Kisumu, Kenya, is available at http://mci.ei.columbia.edu/files/2014/05/Kisumu_HH_Survey_Report_F2014.pdf. The survey instrument itself is available upon request.
- 7.
Including helping to select a site for a World Bank-funded bus rapid transit station project and comprehensive community upgrading in the neighborhoods of Nima, Ga Mashie, and Korle Gonno. Focus groups in these cases included residents, members of street vendors’ and market associations, youth and mothers’ associations, and the transport industry, as well as local, regional, and national ministry-level officials.
- 8.
The international law firms that carried out these regulatory reviews pro bono were Carter Ledyard & Milburn, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, and DLA Piper.
- 9.
The five Millennium Cities where small- to medium-sized enterprises were profiled by UNIDO are Akure, Nigeria; Blantyre, Malawi; Kisumu, Kenya; Kumasi, Ghana; and Mekelle, Ethiopia.
- 10.
A SWOT analysis, or SWOT matrix, is a methodology attributed to American management consultant Albert Humphrey, undertaken to appraise the relative Strengths, Weaknesses/Limitations, Opportunities, and Threats (ergo, “SWOT”) pertaining to any business venture or potential investment project. After defining the project’s aims, this structured technique then proceeds to identify and evaluate as positive or negative an array of pertinent internal and external factors that might affect the attainment of the stated aims.
- 11.
MCI’s five investment guides are for the Millennium Cities of Blantyre, Malawi; Kisumu, Kenya; Kumasi, Ghana; Mekelle, Ethiopia; and Tabora, Tanzania; KPMG produced six investment guides, for Blantyre, Kumasi and Kisumu, Mekelle, and Tabora, with the sixth going beyond Akure to cover the whole of Ondo State, Nigeria.
- 12.
http://mci.ei.columbia.edu/mci/files/2012/12/Sustainable-FDI-Guidance-Paper-Kline.pdf, by John Kline, Georgetown University, commissioned by MCI.
- 13.
This work, carried out by Dr. Zvi Bentwich and his team from Ben-Gurion University, with support from the Government of Israel’s Office of International Cooperation (MASHAV) and the NALA Foundation, is documented in more detail at: http://www.nalafoundation.org/.
- 14.
At the AMA’s request, MCI focused its work in particular on the neighborhoods of Nima, Ga Mashie/Jamestown (Old Accra), and Korle Gonno.
- 15.
At the Form II level in junior high school, equivalent to the eighth grade in an American middle school.
- 16.
Kangaroo Mother Care, developed by Dr. Nils Bergman of the University of Cape Town, is a set of protocols embraced by the World Health Organization that has proven highly successful in supporting mothers and saving the lives of newborns and premature infants through the combination of skin-to-skin contact, exclusive breast-feeding, early release from the hospital, and the intimate bonding that inevitably results.
- 17.
To help address the urgent need to reduce neonatal mortality in the Ashanti countryside, Millennium Villages Project health staff were also trained, as part of both the Israeli-led instruction in Kumasi and the training in HBB.
- 18.
The number of pairs attending the MCI workshops, however, decreased significantly over time, from the first monthly checkup/inoculation appointment to the fourth.
- 19.
Other examples of MCI’s taking advantage of opportunities to address identified needs include our sanitary pad-making project in Mekelle, conceived and implemented by Columbia University School of Nursing Clinical Instructor Mary Moran and her nonprofit organization, Girls2Women. The project, which has been adopted wholeheartedly by the Mekelle public schools, trains early adolescent girls to sew recyclable cotton sanitary pads, making it possible and affordable for them to remain in school during their menses. The other two examples are: (a) MCI partner CyberSmart Africa’s work with interactive digital pens and smart boards in public middle schools in Louga, Senegal, and the nearby Millennium Villages, to hone learning skills and to help keep girls in school; and (b) MCI’s extensive partnership with the Himalayan Cataract Project, furthest evolved in Mekelle, Ethiopia, and Kumasi, Ghana, where top ophthalmologists have by now carried out thousands of cataract repair and other eye surgeries, have trained local ophthalmologists to do the same, and are now opening a Regional Center for Eye Care Excellence in both sites, to be led by these now-seasoned local practitioners.
- 20.
See below for more about MCI’s and LitWorld’s plans and pending financing, to grow the LitClubs program, for girls, boys, and their mothers.
- 21.
For more on MCI’s bamboo bike project and the company, Bamboo Bikes Ltd., see http://mci.ei.columbia.edu/?id=bamboo_bikes, and http://bamboobikeslimited.com.
- 22.
With the possible exception of Kisumu and with its vibrant and highly conscienticized civil society sector.
- 23.
For example, a commercial development or infrastructure project brought in by an elected official may not be known to all stakeholders or may not fit with the more organic, participatory view of community upgrading and economic development envisaged by MCI and other on-the-ground partners.
- 24.
Respectively, these projects were undertaken by the Mount Carmel Training Center, supported by the Government of Israel’s Agency for International Cooperation (MASHAV), in Kumasi and now Accra; MCI, in partnership with Columbia University Teachers College, Ericsson, Airtel Ghana, and the Kumasi Metropolitan Education Directorate; MCI, in partnership with Johnson & Johnson, AmeriCares, the Ghana Health Service, and the Accra and Kumasi Metropolitan Health Directorates; MCI, together with the Earth Institute’s Urban Design Lab and Center for Sustainable Urban Development, Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly, and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; and MCI and LitWorld, together with the Kisumu Municipal Education Office and the Kumasi Metropolitan Education Directorate.
- 25.
Conceived by UDL faculty and MCI Advisory Committee member Geeta Mehta, a social capital credit system goes hand in glove with community upgrading while realizing other MDG-related objectives as well. As another example, youth in a poor community might support that community by paving or building a gutter in an alleyway that floods regularly, thereby earning SoCCs they can then use to start their own mobile phone repair shop or to enroll in a mobile phone repair or other technical training courses.
- 26.
The series of trainings has been conducted by the London-based International Society for Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, with ultrasound equipment donated by Siemens.
- 27.
MCI was told by members of the community that although many researchers had come to Kisumu to investigate one aspect or another of their poverty, we were the first to return and share our findings with the study population.
- 28.
In the Kumasi case, this would involve measuring also the impact of the designed physical space itself on the outcomes of the interventions among the women and girls.
- 29.
The MCI website, mci.ei.columbia.edu, is part of the Earth Institute website, at Columbia University.
- 30.
For projects carried out as part of a Millennium City program designed by a MCI partner, MCI directs interested parties to the appropriate organization or individual.
- 31.
The remaining constraints on rapid progress generally align with those interventions and/or policy changes that cannot take place solely at the municipal level.
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Urban Design Lab renderings of the Kumasi Women’s & Girls’ Center. From Re-Cultivating the Garden City of Kumasi: Spatial Strategies. Columbia University in the City of New York, Urban Design Lab & Millennium Cities Initiative, The Earth Institute, and Urban Design Program, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, 2013. Used with permission from the publisher. (PDF 4367 KB)
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Blaustein, S.M. (2015). The Millennium Cities Initiative: An Experiment in Integrated Urban Development. In: Ahn, R., Burke, T., McGahan, A. (eds) Innovating for Healthy Urbanization. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7597-3_11
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