The Mastering Mobility Training Series equips 30 cities to launch their SUMPs

Planners, consultants and experts from cities and countries around the world gathered every week in November to learn about sustainable urban mobility planning around the key topics of finance, gender, data collection and paratransit during our Mastering Mobility Training Series. Launched at the beginning of November, those events specifically target member cities that have recently started or are about to start, their SUMP process. Through the course of the last four sessions, participants were welcomed by a set of experts on transport and urban development from AFD and GIZ, Cerema, Genre et Ville, Codatu, Espelia and international funds such as the EBRD and the EIB.

With a total of 11 different expert speakers, representatives from 30 member cities from 18 countries were guided through the interactive sessions that ranged from SUMP principles, Finance, Gender and Data Collection to Paratransit. The trainings were organised around the spectrum of key topics of interest of our member cities. Starting off by introducing the 8 guiding principles and 4 phases of the European SUMP cycle and the Avoid-Shift-Improve framework, the following weeks took participants through a programme on financial mechanisms, a gender-equal approach, data collection and impact indicators and the integration and modernisation of paratransit.

The SUMP and Finance session tackled questions such as "how to access finance for climate action" and "how to improve projects' likelihood to receive public and private funding". By developing a coherent SUMP including solid impact calculations and meeting appraisal criteria such as sound economic and financial analysis, cities are more likely to increase investment in sustainable transport. The third training gave concrete evidence on the urgency to involve women in all levels and stages of transport planning to improve accessibility, safety and general productivity of public transport. Here, best practice transport solutions from Karachi, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Kenya were presented. Data collection remains a major challenge in the geographies of our member cities, not only for cities that cannot rely on previously collected data but also in times of fluctuating transport use since the beginning of travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The fourth session categorised the different type of data and the points of integration throughout the SUMP preparation. The last event this year was a co-creation workshop on paratransit, where participants from the French-speaking African Community of Practice came together to brainstorm and develop a typology of the traditional transport offer to discuss possible approaches of a paratransit diagnostic.

The main objective of our new training series is to create a space for knowledge sharing and "virtual-personal" exchange among the Community of Practice right from the beginning of the member cities' process of setting up a SUMP. Interactivity is therefore a central part of our methodology and we are looking forward to expanding this new format in the coming year with new speakers, and an always growing number of participants.

 

The MobiliseYourCity Mastering Mobility Series offers training to all MobiliseYourCity members.

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