UN-Habitat and Colab launch a mobile app for open public consultation on living conditions in Brazilian cities

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Description

Intro

In Brazil, almost 85 per cent of people live in cities. The Sustainable Cities and Communities consultation is a platform that serves as a transparency tool for citizens to provide substantive feedback to local authorities and decision makers. The feedback helps to create public policies that are more responsive to challenges of urbanization in an efficient and integrated way, from the perspective of the city inhabitants. The consultation consists of 29 questions related to indicators of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11), used to compare citizens’ perception of the current state of the city versus two years ago.

Objective of the practice

The initiative has been developed as part of the project “Accountability Systems for Measuring, Monitoring and Reporting on Sustainable City Policies in Latin America”, implemented by UN-Habitat in collaboration with ECLAC, in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and funded by the UN Development Account. 
 
Although Brazil is known for its consultative processes, the needs and desires of citizens often vary greatly and can be difficult to consolidate. Another challenge is the mainstreaming of the Sustainable Development Goals in local developmental agendas. 
 
The project ultimate goal is to strengthens accountability systems in Latin American cities and provides opportunities for the establishment of innovative mechanisms for dialogue between local governments and civil society. Citizens' collaboration and transparency are the best tools to improve public management, and the consultation ensures that the dialogue with the population happens quickly and efficiently, allowing the results to be measured, facilitating the evaluation of public managers. 
 
This approach also serves the purpose of monitoring and overseeing the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities, at the local level. In addition, the project aims to implement SDG17, particularly target 17.9 on capacity building, target 17.17 on multi-stakeholder partnerships, and target 17.19 on data, monitoring and accountability. In addition to providing a broad perspective on the development of SDG11, the consultation, also contributes to the fulfilment of target 17.9: "Enhance international support for implementing effective and targeted capacity-building in developing countries to support national plans to implement all the sustainable development goals, including through North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation". 
 
UN-Habitat and Colab’s citizen consultation seeks to deliver nation-wide impact in the Brazilian context while increasing the awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals globally. 
 
Initially, the consultation was ideated for two Brazilian cities, as part of one of the deliverables mentioned in the project document. However, in the talks held with Colab, it was decided to extend the consultation to the 130 cities with which Colab currently has an agreement to maximise the impact. The project and the idea created such an impact that it escalated to the national level. At the end of the first phase, nearly 10,000 respondents from more than 800 different cities have given their opinion through the mobile and web application.

Partners

UN-Habitat developed the consultation in partnership with Colab. Colab is a citizen-to-government engagement platform that offers a social network for citizens, focused on issue reporting, urban improvement suggestions and public services evaluations, as well as participation in the decision-making process. Once the consultation was implemented, partnership campaigns were developed with private companies focused on marketing and communication, to achieve greater visibility at the national level. These companies became sponsors and adopted the consultation as pro-bono work.

Implementation of the Project/Activity

During one of the workshops for the project “Accountability Systems for Measuring, Monitoring and Reporting on Sustainable City Policies in Latin America”, an interactive activity was carried out to get to know the participants' perception of how their cities were doing on the ten targets of SDG11. A substantial discussion among the participants ensued, due to the different impression each one had, strengthening the proactivity, connectivity, collaboration and participation between them. The results of the workshop were used to develop an online survey to broaden the scope of the exercise. This online survey is available in English and Spanish (http://uni.unhabitat.org/sdg11-survey-english/) and has been used since July 2018. As of February 2019, the survey has gathered over 700 respondents from 51 countries, with most of whom have been participants of training workshops both by UN-Habitat and partners.

The online consultation served as a basis for the development of the mobile app. UN-Habitat and Colab launched the public consultation on 1 October, as it coincided with the festivities/celebrations of the “Urban October”. Since its launch, UN-Habitat and Colab monitored the number of participants and the age, education, gender and city of the respondents on a daily basis, through an online dashboard. The monitoring allowed for deliberation on which dissemination strategies worked the best with the inhabitants, as well as the number of participants per city, identifying which cities had greater participation.

Via social media, Colab recruited local champions who visited neighbourhoods, schools, churches, municipal offices and public gatherings to promote the Sustainable Development Goals and ask people to participate in the consultation. This component of the consultation is was called “the Ambassador Programme. The programme has enabled the consultation to better extend to smaller cities and towns – effectively including an audience that is often difficult to reach. Successful ambassadors are rewarded with prizes such as mugs, t-shirts and free participation in workshops. Colab provides guidance in the form of media kits and strategic advice, and an online platform for the ambassadors to communicate with each other, ask questions and share strategies. As of 1 February 2019, the Ambassador Programme has accounted for 1500 of the consultation respondents.

“I really believe that if you know the real needs of the population, authorities will be able to make decisions more assertively. Collaborating to make my city a sustainable city is awesome, and there is no better source for a city diagnosis than the citizens who live in that city”, said Igor Hemmings, a 25-year-old manager from the city of Caçapava who participated in the consultation and performed as the ambassador of his city.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

The first phase of the project took place from 1 October 2018 to 10 February 2019, during which nearly 10,000 responses were gathered from citizens of more than 800 cities in Brazil. Since its launch the consultation has received nation-wide attention. A week after the initial launch, Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest television broadcaster, showcased the initiative in a news segment on national television. Two Brazilian cities, Belo Horizonte and Niterói, have adopted the application for official city consultations with citizens. The National Federation of Municipalities in Brazil has endorsed the consultation as a tool to increase citizen engagement. Beyond Brazil, the initiative was featured in the last quarterly edition of the United Nations Innovation Network’s 2018 Report.

Currently, the project is in the stage of analyzing the data collected and the creating fact sheets for each of the top 10 cities. This will serve as a basis for initiating dialogues with local authorities on the management and development of their cities towards the ten targets of SDG11. The results of the surveys will also be cross-referenced with official data from Brazilian institutions, such as IBGE and international institutions, to monitor the performance of Brazilian cities concerning SDG11 and other SDGs.

In addition to the fact sheets, a publication (available in English and Portuguese) on the findings of the consultation process is under preparation. It looks at both the national and city levels and makes recommendations for decision-makers. The publication will be presented during the UN-Habitat Assembly, taking place in May 2019 at UN-Habitat Headquarters office in Nairobi, Kenya.

Enabling factors and constraints

Colab’s support
Colab's support was a key part of the success of the consultation, which was implemented with a very limited budget. Colab's platform is a tool already positioned in Brazil, which has served to generate ties of collaboration between the government and the population. Therefore, the seed fund that was allocated to the consultation was sufficient to achieve broad visibility at the national level, and good data collection.

Use of accessible language
The consultation was developed in a way that was easy and accessible to all citizens, using the mobile phone as key driver. The language of the questions was tested before the launch, with a sample of citizens, and edited until achieving a language that was easy to digest and understand, even if the person did not have specific knowledge on urban issues. In addition, the platform was promoted through the most popular communication channels in Brazil for all types of people, regardless of social status and/or age. This includes the national television, Facebook and Google ads, and most importantly, word of mouth through the ambassadors.

Cities’ increasing interest in the SDGs
Cities are increasingly focused on reporting progress in relation to SDGs, in addition to the reports developed at the national level. Understanding and knowing the perception of citizens plays an essential role in the development of these reports, as well as in citizen empowerment for greater involvement in public administration. By providing the right tools, the consultation has served as a bridge between the citizenry and the respective authorities.

Sustainability and replicability

In May 2019, the results will be formally presented to the general public, including local and national authorities. It will raise awareness of the importance of citizen perception and support fundraising to extend the consultation until 2030, with the production of data reports and analysis every year.
In addition, talks are being held with OS City - a Mexican start-up whose work and platform is similar to Colab’s - to replicate the consultation in Bolivia and Peru, both of which are participating countries in the project “Accountability Systems for Measuring, Monitoring and Reporting on Sustainable City Policies in Latin America”.
For the replication in Bolivia and Peru, Foro Ciudades para la Vida and Fundacion para el Periodismo - both counterpart NGOs of the project - are also being involved in playing as the key actors to achieve engagement of both local governments and citizens. Both NGOs are in charge of carrying out citizen observatories (among other projects). Hence, providing an easy-access tool with greater reach, such as a mobile application, will help the work they have been doing of citizen perception and involvement, have an outstanding scope and impact, and in turn have higher influence at the time of decision-making by the mayor's office.
As for the broader potential for replication, UN-Habitat is working on communicating the outcomes of this initiative to member states and partners worldwide, with the aim to create opportunities for cross-fertilization and ideas to increase accountability and citizen engagement through mobile phones in different contexts.

Conclusions

To satisfy today’s and tomorrow’s challenges in cities and communities, a more systematic approach and a robust measurement process to track progress is taking place. To do so, urban solutions tailored to the needs of citizens is an excellent opportunity to identify the improvement niches as well to expand both the knowledge and awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda to a broader audience. 
 
Thanks to the data collected through the consultation, points for improvement and lessons learned that will be considered for the next stage of consultation have been identified. For example, the participation of the most vulnerable groups has not yet been fully achieved, as well as the involvement of adolescents and children. This population segment is indispensable for a broader and more complete picture of the perception of the citizens, and they will be given a greater focus in the next stages of the consultation.

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