Redesigning Investment Climate in Kenya’s Intermediary Cities: A Look into the UK Government’s Granu

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Redesigning Investment Climate in Kenya’s Intermediary Cities: A Look into the UK Government’s Granular Approach in Kisii Municipality Context: In Africa, rapid urban growth is happening in towns and municipalities driving social and economic transformation. These secondary/intermediary cities, especially those along regional borders struggle to accommodate this rapid expansion because of the varied population influx. This necessitates the need to put priority on helping them build economic resilience to strengthen the link between the rural areas and the urban centers in order to balance between traditional and industrial economic opportunities. In doing so, intermediary cities will move from a development-oriented approach based on artificial dependency between primary and secondary cities to one that is geared towards harnessing the secondary cities unique offerings to ensure an interdependent system that spurs economic growth. While the aim is to ensure that these upcoming cities of the future, build equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban centres, they currently need a lot of technical support to enable them to develop in a way that is built upon local socio-economic priorities and within the context of their local economic development ecosystem. To do this, a shift has to be made at leadership level to enable them to own as well as drive decisions that will drive economic change in their locality in a way that is responsive to the needs of the populations they serve. Previous efforts of addressing economic concentration have seen the uptake of industry clusters around large cities making autonomy, transparency, responsiveness, and accountability of intermediary cities difficult. There is need to support upcoming intermediary cities to have the right urban policies as well supporting legal and enabling frameworks. The policies and regulations should define the roles of the devolved government and the private sector to ensure sustainable urban economic development. In doing so, these regulatory frameworks will support intermediary cities to create an enabling business environment that attracts new sources of investment leading to local economic transformation. Programme Intervention and Approach In Kenya, the Urban Areas and Cities (Amendment) Act 2019 empowers intermediary cities to create public policies that will create an enabling environment at all levels to encourage inward investments into their urban centers. To assist with this, the UK Government funded Sustainable Urban Economic Development Programme (SUED) worked with one of its 12 supported municipalities, Kisii Municipality, to develop responsive policies to provide a regulatory framework for investors. The priority was on supporting Kisii to address policy and regulatory constraint to private sector led urban growth by creating a favourable business environment for investment attraction and implementation of the Urban Economic Plan (UEP) developed through SUED. To achieve this objective the programme undertook a Capacity Needs Assessment (CNA) to identify the capacity gaps, challenges and opportunities within the municipal boards and staff on 1


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Redesigning Investment Climate in Kenya’s Intermediary Cities: A Look into the UK Government’s Granu by Tetra Tech International Development Europe - Issuu