Requesting resources on city benchmarking for African cities
Dear LEDNA members,
I am currently working with the World Bank in Ethiopia and the Addis Ababa City Government on a benchmarking exercise for the city towards improving its competitiveness and economic growth prospects.
I would be very interested to hear from any of you who have conducted similar excercises for your cities and have any documents / experiences to share.
If anyone can share other African city benchmarking exercises or city specific sources of data in Africa that would be great.
I am also looking for case studies of success where cities achieved higher levels of competitiveness through effective government policies, so if members have suggestions on this that would also be great.
Hope to hear from some of you who have experience with this kind of excercise.
Emma Wadie Hobson
Local economic development benchmarking
Hi Emma,
We have developed a qualitative benchmarking tool for LED at municipalities. To date we have benchmarked LED practices at 64 municipalities, including 4 cities, in South Africa.The tool is endorsed by GTZ and the South African Local Government Association. Let me know if wish to know more about it.
John
Is this in the Public domain
John, this work on LEd in South Africa may be interesting for LEDNA members as well as Emma. Is the work in the public domain? Can you share with all of us? Best Gwen Swinburn
Hi Gwen, The results/reports
Hi Gwen,
The results/reports are confidential but the instrument is available under creative commons. We strongly recommend training before use of the instrument. We can provide some but limited info.
Confidentiality of results is important to protect the weaker performing municipalities. The main objective is learning and the risk is that evidence of poor performance, could be used for political gain by others. Unless stakeholders feel safe, they typically hesitate to participate in benchmarking.
An alternative (top down approach) is where higher levels of government, utilise the instrument for performance measurement of municipal LED maturity.
John
World Bank Data- Sub_national Indicators
EmmaI have just uploaded some new materials from the World Bank. If you can be a little more specific as to your needs, then I can pass on more information for you. meanwhile take a look at these sub-national indicators
Thanks so much John and
Thanks so much John and Gwen! Great to see that they are now doing Doing Business Reports subnationally. Also, John I will definitely contact you for more information on the actual tool as well as on the results in the 4 cities. As Addis Ababa is the focus city, it would be good to find a good benchmark city from South Africa that we could compare it against, using some relevant indicators.
Just to give some more information on what I am doing. I am expected to produce a background paper with two major sections:
• the first section will focus on what to compare, i.e., the various dimensions of a ‘competitive city’ one would like to compare and the appropriate cities to compare. This section will need to define what is meant by a ‘competitive city’ and develop appropriate indicators to assess the performance of selected cities along the various dimensions identified for benchmarking.
• the second section will focus on what the comparator cities are doing or what best practice cities have done in terms of policy and projects to achieve their outcomes. This section will analyze the different factors that have led to positive accomplishments across the different dimension of competitiveness and identify which of those factors would assist Addis Ababa in raising its competitiveness. To determine what can and cannot work in the context of Addis Ababa, the consultant is expected to use applicable theories and practices from Local Economic Development thinking as well as from other schools of thought to explain the underlying rationales for why and how Addis Ababa can apply the lessons to be learnt from comparator cities.
Emma, this also might be helpful...
Hi Emma!I uploaded some information on Benchmarking, this is work in which John has been involved. Please check out the following link:http://www.ledna.org/en/documents/led-maturity-assessment-qualitative-be...Let us know what you think :-)!Warm regardsMarianne
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