Quality Infrastructure for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development in Cities

Quality infrastructure is infrastructure that ensures effective governance, reliable operation, economic efficiency, safety and resilience, and plays a vital role in realizing “sustainable and inclusive urban prosperity” and fostering “ecological and resilient cities and human settlements,” which are two of the main guiding principles of the New Urban Agenda. This event will support participants to develop quality infrastructure by sharing knowledge and experience from countries and MDBs, proposing new perspectives for quality infrastructure from various international organizations and building a network of potential partners for future projects. The event will address the importance of quality infrastructure and acknowledge its benefits and the role it plays in realizing the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and promoting a strong urban development. In the first half of the event, Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and countries/cities working with those MDBs will share their knowledge and experience from their quality infrastructure projects as well as evaluate the effect it had on the country’s urban development. In the second half of the event, participants from variety of international organizations (with focus, for example, on environment, social inclusiveness and resilience) will express their expectations for quality infrastructure and proposing new perspectives to improve its development and boost its benefits.The panelist of the event will include representative from a variety of entities with different perspective and geographic scope (e.g. national, regional, and local governments, MDBs, international organizations). Finally, a declaration will be adopted by the participating organizations to address the importance of quality infrastructure in realizing the NUA and to express joint commitments of countries and MDBs to collaborate to take concrete actions towards the promotion of quality infrastructure investment.