Secondary Cities Infrastructure Development Project

Within the framework, of the Technical Assistance mission to the Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) Espelia’s consultants traveled to the cities of Fort Portal and Arua in early March 2023. The objective of this mission was to facilitate two training sessions and co-construction workshops on the following topics:

• Public participation in project design, implementation and monitoring,
• Climate change awareness raising,
• Finalization of the capacity building plan.

These trainings were attended by a diverse group of participants:

• Political leaders (Mayor & Town clerk)
• Technical officials (project manager, physical planner, engineer…)
• Representants of the City Development Forum.

These sessions stemmed from the development of a Stakeholder Engagement Plan (SEP) by the consultants. The objective of the SEP was to maintain a high level of engagement among the cities as well as to promote the peer-to-peer learning dynamic that is central to this program.

As such, the city of Fort Portal hosted its counterparts from Mbarara during the two-day training session and, Arua hosted the city of Soroti. The participants exchanged on their respective challenges and shared their solutions adopting the intended peer-to-peer learning approach.

This technical assistance is almost complete. As a reminder, its objective was to support AFD and MoLHUD in the co-construction of a national program aimed at strengthening the development of urban institutions and infrastructure in secondary cities in Uganda.

It followed the following steps:

• Mapping and mobilization of stakeholders,
• Organization of a national workshop to co-construct the main orientations of the program,
• Definition and validation of the program implementation strategy and its implementation modalities,
• Preparation of a program implementation action plan as well as a capacity building plan.