Visioning workshop in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, UN-Habitat
Introduction
Ethiopia is facing the rapid transformation of its urban landscape as a result of high levels of economic growth, averaging 10% a year, which the country experienced over the past 15 years. Bahir Dar is one of the leading tourist destinations in Ethiopia, with a variety of attractions in Lake Tana and Blue Nile River. The city is known for its wide avenues lined with palm trees and a variety of colourful flowers. In 2002, it was awarded the UNESCO Cities for Peace Prize for addressing the challenges of rapid urbanisation.
Context and background
In 2016, Bahir Dar started a planning process, led and financed by Bahir Dar University. However, due to additional support needed, in 2019 they requested UN-Habitat's support. The work started based on the observation of some imbalance: local governments are the best positioned to spend money locally and to be accountable for it, but the federal government is the best positioned to collect the money. Property taxes and land-based finance are the only two main sources of funding for local governments. As a result, to fund urbanisation and attract more resources, there is a need to align the local goals to the national ones. An additional reason to prepare monitoring tools in the perspective of the Structure Plan is because city managers and mayors are only focused on land-use when preparing the plan, but they are not considering the strategic vision for the city. In that sense, a technical workshop was organised in Bahir Dar to determine the vision and the goals of the city.
Plan and process
For Bahir Dar Structural Plan – Vision 2035, 11 goals were selected to support Ethiopia to achieve the NUSDP goals. Participants were divided into 6 groups (“6 Ps”): people, planet, planning, prosperity, peace, partnership. They selected core values and one common mission based on the work of the 6 groups. The 11 goals were then revised by the mayor in a way that they were defined by all stakeholders, with both participatory and political filters. Goals were translated into targets and indicators that will guide the data collection.
Resource for the development of Our City Plans
Under this project, UN-Habitat’s supported Bahir Dar University and Bahir Dar City Administration in the Bahir Dar Structure Plan preparation, as part of the implementation of focus areas 1 (capacity building) and 2 (urban and regional planning) of the UN-Habitat Country Programme for Ethiopia, funded by Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
The experience acquired from the elaboration of the Bahir Dar Structure Plan has been resourceful for the development of Our City Plans methodology, especially the participatory activities to formulate the vision, goals and the spatialisation of the vision were included and adapted into Our City Plans Guidelines.
Results
The final result of this collaboration is the strategic component of the Bahir Dar Structure Plan and the Spatial Analysis (results from data collection and analysis). Additionally, the Bahir Dar City's Structure Plan was led by the Bahir Dar University and was finalised in 2021.
