News

PREPARATORY MEETING OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON THE 24^th and 25^th June in Istanbul

 A preparatory meeting of the founding general assembly will be held on 24^th and 25^th June 2010 in Istanbul, in order to present the project in its entirety to the members of METROPOLIS and to the other local authorities who have expressed interest in the approach.  The preparatory meeting will also make it possible to agree on how the structure will operate and on the commitments that the local authorities will be led to make as members.

It will be a pre-meeting of the Board of Directors, and it will prepare the structuring decisions of the NGO: level of membership fees, validation of the articles of association and of the budget, and identification of the launch projects.

THE GFCD STRATEGIC REGIONAL WORKSHOP WAS HELD ON 25^th MARCH IN RIO

METROPOLIS invited the representatives of the local authorities of Latin America and their institutional, technical, and financial partners to take part in a regional strategic workshop on setting up the Global Fund for Cities Development (GFCD).  That workshop was held on 25^th March 2010 in Rio de Janeiro, alongside the World Urban Forum, on the premises of SEBRAE/RJ (the Brazilian Micro and Small Enterprises Bureau/Rio de Janeiro).  The workshop brought together a broad panel of players in local development in Brazil and in Latin America.

The objectives of the workshop were to present the overall approach of the GFCD in order to identify urban development programmes and projects led by local authorities that could benefit from support from the GFCD through technical assistance and financial engineering giving access to sources of funding.

The workshop was chaired by Elisabete França, Director for Social Housing of the City of São Paulo, and was led by the teams from the GFCD and from Evenson Dodge International (EDI), a financial intermediation firm with whom METROPOLIS is working to design a financial model enabling local authorities to access funding for their urban programmes.

The presentations were followed by exchanges and debates with the participants that made it possible to deepen the discussions on the needs of Brazilian local authorities in terms of access to funding and on the tool that is being proposed to them through the GFCD.  All of the attending entities received the approach favourably, with a desire to take the debate forward and deepen it.