The main purpose of this project is to develop a City Performance Monitoring Framework (CPMF) in line with the Ethiopian Cities Sustainable Prosperity Goals (ECSPGs). This tool is aimed to be tested in two Ethiopian cities and replicated and scaled up to other cities and towns in Ethiopia in order to transform the urban development of the country, promoting the development of a more sustainable and dynamic national economy.
Through the CPMF, the extent of city level urban transformations will be monitored based on several dimensions and indicators including availability of urban infrastructure, quality of basic services and inclusiveness of urban areas; extent of reforms undertaken and quality of governance in urban areas, environmental sustainability and disaster resilience of urban areas, etc. This will mostly be aligned with the pillars. An overall measure of performance will be based on a weighted aggregation of several indices and indicators.
After assessing the pillars, programmes and identified projects of the ECPSGs, UN-Habitat will apply the methodology similar to that used by the six dimensions of the City Prosperity Index (CPI). The result will be a customised city performance monitoring index/system that fits the Ethiopian context and this will be designed to monitor overall progress, bottlenecks, and actions taken for the development and fulfilment of the CPMF objectives. In terms of identifying indicators, the targets of the ECSPGs will be checked using CPI, global urban indicators and other variables used by the Global Urban Observatory. Special indicators designed to enhance performance and sectoral implementation monitoring will be included to complement other indicators. In addition to the UN-Habitat's measurement tools, the development of the CPMF will take into account ISO 37120 recommendations, which is a standard for city indicators.
The parameters of the indicators will be developed in a way to measure the national performance of cities, in which case the targets of the ECSPGs will be used. In order to compare the performances of Ethiopian cities with cities around the world, globally standardized parameters will be applied, and the methodology will ensure repeated measures to allow for building trends of performance for all indicators. The final analysis system will deploy a traffic light system in reporting progress, or lack of progress or constraints in the achievement of any indicator.
Once the CPMF is developed, it will be tested in two cities selected from two regions in the country. The selection of the region and their respective cities will be done in consultation with the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing.
The main steps to this analytical and systems development process will include:
Conceptualization of the city performance monitoring system and ensure incorporation of the urban transformation measures, and progress measures. This will include define the inputs, outputs and other appropriate markers or measures of short changes/impacts.
Select/agree on sets of thematic dimensions/indicators of the CPMF - possible dimensions could be Urban Infrastructure Service Levels, Reforms and Governance, Environmental Sustainability, Inclusiveness and Disaster Resilience, etc.
Identify measurable indicators for the sub-indices at the city level. An initial list of indicators would be prepared for all the dimensions for initial discussions with government and city managers, and Experts/Institutions. Thereafter, based on feedback and consultations, prepare a shortlist from the initial list of indicators on the basis of relevance to the CPMF, ease of measurement, universality and credibility.
Field test shortlisted indicators in 2 cities and based on the test results, modify the indicators to strengthen them and improve relevance to sun-indices.
Field test the modified set of indicators again and prepare the final list of indicators. Assign weights to the indicators using Principal Component Analysis or other statistical techniques and firm up CPMF computation process/formula.
Primary data will be collected from the two cities for testing, and ranking of the cities/local governments using the CPMF formula and data of indicators collected from cities.
The methodology will be further calibrated and adjusted to cater for missing data, and other regional inconsistencies.
Finally we will connect results with performance decision making and policy analysis tools to allow for quick overviews and advice at the local government/city level. This will be developed as a system which will allow for plug-in of local government/city data over years and be able to produce graphics, tables and maps of overall performance, and in-depth city analysis.
Ministry teams and regional/local government officials will be trained on utilization of the system.
