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The future of humanity is urban. Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent in the world with an expected 1.2 billion urban residents by 2050. The continent’s urbanisation comes with extraordinary transformative potential, but the structural hurdles are equally huge. Historically, there is compelling evidence to suggest that urbanisation and economic growth are mutually reinforcing. Yet in Africa, urbanisation is happening in a context of slow structural transformation, pervasive urban poverty and inequalities that compromise a hopeful urban future.
Building on last year’s Istanbul Innovation Days, the 2019 Harare Innovation Days on #NextGenCities will focus on the strategic risks and opportunities inherent in Africa’s rapid urbanisation. It will invite senior civil servants responsible for cities and bring them together with cutting-edge practitioners working on urban solutions from digitally-enabled distributed infrastructure provision to nature-based solutions, and from participatory city-making to sustainable food systems.
Harare Innovation Days is twinned with an Asia-Pacific focussed Innovation Days event in March 2020 on #NextGenGov. Following both events, we aim to open up new pathways for targeted support for collaborative experimentation and learning trajectories within governments starting in the Asia-Pacific, Africa and Arab States region. The Innovation Days have emerged as UNDP’s corporate R&D function, which aims to influence the demand and alert governments to trends and risks, accelerate learning about their potential implications and creates space for strategic co-creation of potential systemic pathways of response — thereby enhancing our transformational capacity to continuously refresh our programmatic offering vis-a-vis our partner countries.
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Building on last year’s Istanbul Innovation Days, the 2019 Harare Innovation Days on #NextGenCities will focus on the strategic risks and opportunities inherent in Africa’s rapid urbanisation. It will invite senior civil servants responsible for cities and bring them together with cutting-edge practitioners working on urban solutions from digitally-enabled distributed infrastructure provision to nature-based solutions, and from participatory city-making to sustainable food systems.
Harare Innovation Days is twinned with an Asia-Pacific focussed Innovation Days event in March 2020 on #NextGenGov. Following both events, we aim to open up new pathways for targeted support for collaborative experimentation and learning trajectories within governments starting in the Asia-Pacific, Africa and Arab States region. The Innovation Days have emerged as UNDP’s corporate R&D function, which aims to influence the demand and alert governments to trends and risks, accelerate learning about their potential implications and creates space for strategic co-creation of potential systemic pathways of response — thereby enhancing our transformational capacity to continuously refresh our programmatic offering vis-a-vis our partner countries.
︎ Read more
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