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Newsletter – n°36 – September 2015

Headlines

Reaching SDGs from the ground-up!

The crowds have gone, conference rooms are empty: the curtain has fallen on the UN summit on the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). And now starts the really hard part, thankless: paving the road to reach them by 2030, painstakingly, not even brick by brick, rather pebble by pebble. And across the world...

News from the Secretariat

EU budget 2016: Defending the “local authorities in development” budget line

The UN summit on Sustainable Development Goals and the preparations for the forthcoming COP 21 summit have put development cooperation and decentralised cooperation on the agenda these past weeks. Including future funding for both...

News from partners

Decentralised cooperation: the Latin American way

Cités Unies France and Mexico City have joined forces to publish a special issue of “Les cahiers de la cooperation décentralisée” as a testimony of the achievements of the two-year long AL-LAs (Alliance euro-latino-américaine de cooperation entre villes) project...

Monitoring quality “is a must” for decentralised cooperation

The new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs – see article above) will be achieved through effective development cooperation, and this in turn can be achieved by strengthening knowledge sharing and learning. This is one of the main conclusions of the steering committee of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation meeting in Mexico on 3 and 4 September...

Initiative worth following

Africities 20015: the biggest local event in Africa !

Africities 2015 will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa from 29 November to 3 December. The triennial meeting of Africa’s local authorities is organised by UCLGA (United Cities and Local Governments Africa) and this year’s central theme is “Shaping the future of Africa with the people: the contribution of African local authorities to Agenda 2063 of the African Union”...

Calendar

Upcoming

12 - 15 October (Brussels, Belgium): OPEN DAYS – European week of regions and cities, consult the event webpage

29 November – 3 December (Johannesburg, South Africa): 7^th Africities Summit, consult the event webpage

30 November - 11 December (Paris, France): Conference of Parties (COP21), consult the event webpage

[Archive]

11 and 16: the numbers that count for our towns and regions…

Goal 11 (making our towns safer, inclusive, sustainable). Goal 16 (building effective, accountable, inclusive institutions at all levels). They were adopted in New York at the UN summit on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). After a long campaign and tons of efforts by PLATFORMA and its partners, for the first time ever the UN and the international community have recognised the key role of our towns and regions in development. For the first time ever decentralised cooperation is recognised as a factor of change and progress for the whole world! Worth celebrating? Without a doubt; however this well-deserved victory drains with it responsibilities. The post New York Summit has already started for local governments as the coming years will be crucial for us to prove, to demonstrate that our towns and regions make a genuine contribution towards a better world. This is why this newsletter highlights quality control of our projects, ensuring adequate EU funding, exchanging meaningful experience. They are the tools, our tools, to ensure the SDGs will be reached.