Community of Practice for Municipal Finance Practitioners
PPIAF's Sub National Technical Assistance program has launched a Community of Practice for Municipal Finance Practitioners. Used extensively in the aerospace industry and by corporations such as GE, Communities of Practice (CoP) are increasingly considered “the killer application for knowledge management”. (Rumizen, 2002, A Complete Idiots Guide to Knowledge Management). PPIAF-SNTA believes that there is enormous potential that could be gained by encouraging connections with and between municipal finance practitioners and allowing conversations to flow. Municipal finance practitioners make numerous financial tradeoffs and decisions - on a daily basis - to meet their development needs and respond to the demands of their city’s varied constituencies. This CoP strives to tap into this collective (often tacit) knowledge and serve as a powerful forum for capturing experiences and sharing expertise, so members can learn from each other and adapt approaches that work to the context of their own economies and societies.
The CoP is a part of a ground-breaking effort to reach 300 cities in developing countries over four years to help them plan for a low-carbon future and get the needed finance flowing. This initiative was launched by the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim as part of the Low-Carbon, Livable Cities Initiative (LC2). One of the components of this initiative is the creditworthiness academy which is an intense set of training modules ranging from revenue management to climate smart capital investment planning, from debt financing options to the enabling environment for sub-national finance. This CoP will provide academy participants and other members with the ability to connect, communicate, and collaborate across geographic boundaries, government hierarchies and organizational silos.
Our community is a little over a month old and has already attracted more than a 100 members. We are very excited by the rich and insightful content that our members are generating, and pleasantly surprised by the range of opportunities for collaboration that the community is identifying. For instance: municipal fiancé officers from our Nairobi and Seoul training academies have engaged in a discussion that touches the topics of integrated development plans, sector plans, multi-year budgeting, and monitoring of performance and service delivery. A member has posted insightful feedback from participation at the recent Korean Environmental Institute conference. And another member has posted a project proposal for funding consideration. On invitation, a senior urban advisor at the World Bank shared his experience from being at the World Urban Forum 7 organized by UN Habitat and talked about technical sessions and energy at the event.
To connect with our community and share knowledge, please click on the following link to sign-into the C4D platform: https://collaboration.worldbank.org/groups/city-credit-worthiness
After you are signed-in, please click on the link to the “Community of Practice for Municipal Finance Practitioners” and click on "join this group" on the top right hand of the page.
We look forward to seeing you in the community.