Establishment of Information Systems to help initiate City-to-City Partnerships in Ecuador and Zimbabwe

The IULA (International Union of Local Authorities) in partnership with UNV have created a project to foster "Municipal-International Cooperation", i.e. partnerships between cities of different countries. This, also called City-to-City Co-operation, represents a new field of development co-operation - independent from central government, bilateral agencies and multilateral donors.

The project has started in Ecuador and Zimbabwe with the placing of 2 UN Volunteers in the IULA Regional Offices in Quito and Harare respectively. 1 of the volunteers in each office is an Information Systems Specialist and operates under the UNITeS umbrella.

The four volunteers (the counterparts of the Volunteers affiliated with UNITeS being specialists in Urban Development) are addressing the prevailing lack of systematic communication and information exchange about supply and demand of urban development expertise, through:

• Collection of baseline information about local governments supplying technical expertise in specific areas of municipal development, and municipalities in need of support.
• Collection of information about good practices.
• Design of a database containing the collected information, and establishment of a communication/information sharing network between municipalities.
• Ensuring sustainability of ongoing data collection, maintenance of the database and information flows after the end of the project.

The volunteers are also motivating their contacts in local authorities to further expand their on-going partnerships with other city-governments, or to embark on new city-to-city co-cooperation initiatives.

The project will be continued with support to a selected number of individual municipal-international co-operation initiatives, which will arise out of promotion of the city-to-city partnership concept, the information exchange facilitated by the contributions of the Volunteers.