Annual Reports

Key highlights in this year’s report include: The growth in the number of client or country executed projects or activities, in line with the Cities Alliance new Medium Term Strategy which promotes city and country ownership of projects. Among the current active or newly approved projects, 13 percent are executed by local authority and nearly 40 percent more by a country partner. This is in contrast with the profile of grant funding during the first four years of the Alliance’s launch (FY 00 – 03), when only seven percent of projects were executed by a local authority and an additional 15% by a country client. Today, approximately half of Cities Alliance projects are already under country execution.

The Cities Alliance 2006 Annual Report focuses on the poverty of the urban environment. It argues, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that cities are threats to both global and local environment, urban areas may actually proffer the best hope for a sustainable environmental future. However, both developing country cities, and their development partners, need to place the urban environment high on their respective agendas, and target the linkages between urban poverty, urban environment degradation and poor policy frameworks.

A first in the tradition of CA Annual Reports is the Members' Reports pages, presented in a separate section in the middle of the report.

This year's report stresses the critical need for policies and strategies to promote the positive impacts of urbanisation: '"Instead of debating the contribution of cities to development, more energy needs to be spent on unblocking it". The report also illustrates how by working directly with cities, Alliance funded activities are helping to engage local authorities in the national policy dialogue, as well as encouraging them to be proactive developers of urban infrastructure by mobilising domestic capital.