CITIES DONOR FUND

The world is living through an unprecedented crisis as COVID-19 continues to spread, with tens of thousands of lives lost and over two hundred countries affected. In just a few months, the pandemic has transformed the way we live, work, travel, and socialize. The world’s cities are generally reacting quickly to this urban humanitarian crisis and how they respond is critical to protect their population, halt the pandemic, and set the scene for resilience and recovery.

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Cities Donor Fund is responding to a growing volume of requests from both national and local governments to help them prepare for, prevent, respond to, and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on more than 100 years of smart city, urban experience, IoT and telecom much of it is looking for help to define what tomorrow will look like post-COVID-19 and beyond - in some cases the need is purely around how technology can help with humanitarian situations, we are focusing on investing Cities Fund dollars at the city-level response to the crisis. We are leveraging our extensive network of implementation partners on the ground, across the globe, bringing together public and private sector leaders, innovators, and non-governmental organizations. Embedded in our mission and vision, we will bring our catalytic support to help central and local governments, communities as well as will look to support government agencies to make their work more impactful. 

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The impact of COVID-19 will be most devastating in areas across America and the world where the poor and densely populated urban areas, especially for the one billion people living in informal settlements and slums worldwide as well as for refugees, internally displaced people, and migrants. Urgent action is needed to help them stay safe and healthy as measures to slow transmission such as physical distancing, self-quarantine or community-wide lockdowns are almost impossible in these overcrowded areas and even the most basic hygiene measures prove challenging as water and soap are often unavailable for handwashing. The lack of any regular employment means people are still moving outside their homes to seek work to meet their daily survival needs. 

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This dedicated giving fund structure provides the team behind cities.fund the opportunity to use strategic funds to invest and support the use of resilience-focused development, the implementation of a data-driven global agenda, while working with local city governments to improve the ways communities build a more sustainable future.