The GFCD approach

The GFCD is developing a methodology for comprehending the new phenomena of urban development. It is putting in place an economic model and a financial model taking into consideration the latest developments in expertise and in practice as regards local development, urban development, and funding tools.

The approach proposed by the GFCD aims to help project-leading local authorities and their institutional, technical, and private partners in the entire urban development process, from designing programmes and projects to funding them, implementing them, and assessing them.

That help will be given through technical assistance that is essentially based on experience of decentralised co-operation, and through financial engineering that offers access to funding.

The project-leading local authority assigns to the GFCD the task of working on three pillars:

a. Survey of the urban economy and of local development, considering that the local economy should fund local development.

b. Survey on urban planning: support for developing urban programmes in order to enable them to be consistent, to fit together in cross-cutting manner, and to be kept under control spatially, temporally, and in inter-sector manner.

c. Financial engineering: setting up schemes comprising various potential funding (donations, subsidies, low-interest-rate funding, market-interest-rate funding, etc.).

The added value of the GFCD approach is hinged around two main focuses

1. An economic development and urban planning model that makes it possible to:

- Hinge the projects and programmes together optimally;

- Obtain an urban approach that is inclusive of the poor and of the rich;

- Put in place the local capacities necessary to keeping urban development under control

- Bring out the capacities of funding through local development

2. A financial model proposed to the project-leading local authorities for their urban programmes that makes it possible to:

- Increase the opportunities for funding;

- Unite and improve the conditions for medium-term and long-term funding;

- Reduce the financial risk for the city

- Put in place dedicated local and national public and para-public financial instruments.