In this video, Lydia Sackey-Addy, an official from Accra, Ghana, as well as the World Bank’s Senior Director Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez and Lead Urban Economist Maria Angelica Sotomayor tell us how they are working together to make the Accra metropolitan area more resilient and sustainable for its residents.

This paper aims to inform future policy by providing a critical analysis of grassroots finance models. It argues for more locally centred and driven sustainable development but also considers the limitations: What are the critical challenges of participation, scale and the translation of savings into development resources? By concentrating on activities with a high degree of community leadership, this paper looks at the challenges of shaping localised arrangements to fit with structured development programming.

This Sustainable Urbanization Strategy outlines how UNDP is responding to rapid urbanization in developing countries and its consequences for sustainable development. It outlines how UNDP will support countries and cities, building upon its past and current work on urbanization. The strategy presents the complex and evolving urban challenges and the interrelated development choices which cities face as they strive to achieve the SDGs and implement the New Urban Agenda. It also sets out UNDP’s comparative advantage and experience in core thematic areas which are relevant to achieving the SDGs in cities and urban areas.

It is widely believed that urbanisation is occurring faster in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world, as migrants move from rural to urban settlements. This is a fallacy. While the populations of numerous urban areas are growing rapidly, the urbanisation levels of many countries are increasing slowly – if at all. Natural increase, rather than net in-migration, is the predominant growth factor in most urban populations. African governments, policymakers and international donors need to acknowledge fundamental changes in urbanisation trends, and respond to the irrefutable messages these impart about urban employment, incomes and economic development.

This report provides a gender review of a decade and a half of World Bank infrastructure lending for 1,246 projects. The objective of this review is to assess the status of and trends in gender integration in the World Bank infrastructure portfolio, and to establish a baseline for monitoring and enhancing gender integration in line with commitments made for the 2006 Gender Action Plan.