• Making Cities Work Speaker Series

     
    USAID’s Urban Programs Team is once again hosting a regular speaking series on important issues in urban development. This monthly speaker series will feature experts who will share the latest findings, best practices, or emerging issues in a casual brownbag session. On June 30, 2011, USAID hosted Mohammad Yunos Nowandish,...

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  • Making Cities Work: Towards our Urban Future

     
    With the world’s population now majority urban, and most of this urban growth taking place in developing countries, USAID programs are becoming more affected by issues of rapid urbanization. Cities can be engines of economic growth and innovation, but they can also be places where overcrowding, crime, and poor health conditions...

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  • USAID Urban Inventory

    To improve and increase the shared knowledge base of our experience in urban programming, we are collecting information on current USAID projects that occur in urban areas in a database that is accessible to all USAID employees.
     
    This database, accessed on USAID’s intranet and open only to USAID personnel, will serve as a...

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  • Third Annual Urban Poverty Paper Competition Now Open!

    We are pleased to announce the third annual paper competition on Urban Poverty.

     

    To encourage a new generation of urban policy makers and promote early career research, USAID’s Urban Programs Team, International Housing Coalition (IHC), World Bank, Woodrow Wilson Center’s Comparative Urban Studies Project (CUSP),...

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USAID is Making Cities Work

“Your work in addressing the challenges and seizing the opportunities of urbanization is essential for the sustainability of our world. As cities confront rapid growth while coping with tight budgets, we must strengthen public private partnerships, enforce good governance, and continue developing innovative financing tools to enable local authorities to balance the needs of their people. The challenges of urbanization are linked to everything, from democracy and human rights, to climate change and global health…”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, March 26, 2010 video address to World Urban Forum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

 

Cities and towns are now home to more than half the world’s population. With the developing world absorbing most of this urban growth, harnessing the promise of rapid urbanization is not just a good idea, it’s a necessity. USAID works to strengthen inclusive cities that adequately serve their citizens, encouraging people to live productive lives in safe and healthy communities.