Ayuda Urbana (Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean region)

Last Updated
17 November, 2003

Ayuda Urbana

Work and Skills

Focused on urban issues and challenges in Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean region. Aimed to help cities improve their technical expertise and municipal effectiveness by connecting mayors and their staff to focus on pressing issues and challenges. Assumes that the reader is familiar with the concept of community of practice.

Cases in Work and Skills.

Executive summary of the case:
Timing of case
Project proposal was approved by the council of mayors in September 2000
In July 2002 operations were handed over to a team managed by the local association of mayors (UCCI/CAMC)

Geographic setting
A group of ten cities decided to participate in the initiative: Guatemala City, Havana, Managua, Mexico City, Panama City, San Jose, San Juan, San Salvador, Santo Domingo, and Tegucigalpa.

Type and use of ICT
Web site and knowledge management tools.

Main contributors
Mayor of San Salvador
Economic Development Committee of UCCI/CAMC
World Bank Thematic Groups
Urban specialists

Main beneficiaries
Urban practictitioners

Background
The Ayuda Urbana initiative is the latest development of a broader initiative at the World Bank to focus on knowledge as a key lever in the fight against poverty (as opposed to, or rather in addition to, the traditional focus of the Bank on loans).

Objectives
The objective of the program is to improve the quality of life of all city dwellers by improving municipal effectiveness and efficiency in each of the cities involved. The initiative also has the longer-term objective of developing a new model for knowledge creation and transfer.

Resources (apart from ICT)
The success of the initiative depended on the originators’ ability to line up an array of resources such as coordination, staff, expertice etc. Thematic Groups at the World Banck were a crucial resource in contributing both domain and process expertice to the Ayuda Urbana communities as they formed and developed. Expertice was both in the form of contribution of knowledge material for the website, but also specific knowledge such as City Development Strategy, Disaster Management, Municipal Finance, Urban poverty, and Urban Transport.

Activities
Preparation and launch involved the creation of communities of practice that would take advantage of the knowledge available among the dozens of urban specialists in the participating cities.

The communities of practice were officially launched through a series of two-day workshops. Workshops took place every 2-3 months in different cities.

The project has created an interactive website that serves as a repository for the seven communities of practice.

The project has ben evaluated by an external agency

The project is now haded over to the municipal councils of participating cities. To enable the transition, the World Bank provided the new team with training in web and content management.

Outputs and results
The Ayuda Urbana initiative has had a significant impact on cities in the region and beyond as well. The benefits are evident in both tangible and less tangible ways.

Seven active and ongoing comunities of practice

Generation of the type of knowledge that urban specialists need and can use in their daily work

A Connection between involved urban practitioners, contributing to their sence of professional identity and enhanced the sense of regional municipal identity
The project has resulted in a self-sustaining learning system, and the program has generated interest and inspired similar initiatives elsewhere.

Lessons and conclusions
The Ayuda Urbana has revealed the value of collaboration across borders to address urgent issues in urban development. The experience of the team has also brought to light a number of principles for this type of initiative.

Communities of practice are a very effective vehicle for learning.
What constitutes a “best practice” is subjective.
Develop an ecology of complementary activities.
Respond to actual needs of participants.
Engage practitioners.
Bring a variety of resources.
Prepare for hand-over.

The importance of this initiative is not limited to the improvement it has brought to the capabilities of urban practitioners in the cities involved. It has created a model for knowledge creation and sharing that is already being replicated in several other regions and is applicable to many more regions and domains.

In the future, lending organizations would be wise to make sure that the people to whom they provide funds are involved in such learning systems. Indeed, these constellations of communities of practice connecting practitioners across borders are perhaps the best way to guarantee that loans will be put to optimal use.

Case description:
Background
The Ayuda Urbana initiative is the latest development of a broader initiative at the World Bank to focus on knowledge as a key lever in the fight against poverty (as opposed to, or rather in addition to, the traditional focus of the Bank on loans).

Fighting poverty with knowledge
Since its inception after World War II to assist in European reconstruction, the World Bank had become a major player in development. Its primary business has been to lend money to developing countries. Its loans are associated with specific development projects in physical and socio-economic infrastructure, from highway construction, to urban development, to agriculture, to education. Over the years the Bank has increasingly played an active role in planning for and even implementing these projects. Its teams of advisors increasingly act as “knowledge brokers,” providing development expertise to its clients, often answering questions unrelated to a funded project.

In the fall of 1996, at the bank’s annual meeting, the president James Wolfensohn announced a new focus for the Bank in a public and irreversible manner. He declared that the World Bank would become the “knowledge bank.” The idea was to “eradicate poverty through knowledge.” The Bank should become the place in the world to access knowledge about development—garnered from its own internal experience as well as that of partners, including governments, universities, foundations, and NGOs.

Managing knowledge with communities of practice
With this new strategy, the explicit management of knowledge as an organizational asset became a priority. The first thrust towards the realization of this goal was to focus on the informational infrastructure. The experience of one of the Bank’s team leaders from Chile had shown what needed to be in place. A client had asked her what experiences other countries had in responding to the demands of schoolteachers. Not knowing the answer herself, she had contacted the education advisory service, which assembled information from countries around the world and sent the documents to Santiago. If this set of documents could be stored in a well-organized knowledge base from which it could easily be retrieved, the next time a similar question came up, much effort could be saved. The team went about developing the infrastructure that would make this possible.

Institutionally, the project was also making headway. The importance of knowledge was being recognized through official action. By the summer of 1997, a substantial budget had been set aside for knowledge-management (KM) activities across the organization and a sponsoring board was established to oversee the bank’s activities in the area.

By the fall of 1997, it became clear that an essential element was missing from the overall plan. The focus on “collecting” information had to be supplemented with a focus on “connecting” people. The areas where the knowledge-sharing system worked best were those in which there was a community of practitioners interacting on a regular basis, with a tradition of collaborating around problems and sharing knowledge. A team leader from Yemen had contacted the education help desk because a client wanted to know how to design an information system for its education services. The help desk was able to plug into an existing community whose members decided that the most relevant experience was from Kenya, gathered the documents, and sent them to the team leader in Yemen, along with a set of comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the Kenyan approach. Within a 48-hour timeframe, the team leader was sitting with the client discussing how to tackle the problem.

The KM team started to focus on these informal communities of practice. They found that there were about twenty-five of them functioning across the organization, plus an unknown number of local ones. They decided that the best way to strengthen knowledge sharing at the Bank was to support these groups, which came to be known as Thematic Groups, because they were focused on development themes such as community-based rural development, roads and highways, public health, nutrition, or water resource management. In January 1998, the KM board decided to redirect a part of the budget and offer direct financial support to Thematic Groups who came forward with a plan of action. In March, the KM team organized the first “knowledge fair” during which these Thematic Groups had a chance to run a booth and display their stuff. The success of this knowledge fair greatly boosted the visibility of Thematic Groups as contributors to the mission of the Bank. By the summer of 1998, more than one hundred Thematic Groups had come forward. In early 1999, the KM board commissioned a task force of external experts to perform an assessment of the Bank’s KM program. Their report concluded that the Thematic Groups were the “heart and soul” of the program.

Communities of practice beyond the organization
As time went by, the communities of practice started to focus on relationships beyond the Bank as well as among internal experts. For instance, one community forged an alliance with a university to create a CD to document its practice. The same community was also instrumental in starting a very large, multi-organization initiative to help cities upgrade their slums. In this model, the communities of practice had become of vehicle through which the Bank could connect effectively with other sources of expertise.

The case reported here takes this approach to a knowledge strategy one step further. The idea is to apply to the goal of providing help to countries the same knowledge-management principles that the Bank has been applying to its internal knowledge strategy:
focusing on communities of practice as a way to place the task of managing, developing and sharing knowledge in the hand of practitioners using technology, not to replace these communities, but to support their work and expand opportunities for interactions and access to knowledge.

Under this model for serving the knowledge need of client countries, experts at the Bank take it as their task, not just to provide their knowledge to these clients, but to build communities of practice among a number of clients as a way to develop their capabilities. What started as an internal approach to the management of knowledge has become a centerpiece of the way the Bank does its work in the world.

The inception of the Ayuda Urbana initiative
The Ayuda Urbana initiative was started in conversation about developing municipal capabilities between World Bank urban specialists and several mayors of capital cities in the Central American and Caribbean region. They recognized the value of connecting with peers across borders to address problems and challenges that cities in the region all face.

A group of ten cities decided to participate in the initiative: Guatemala City, Havana, Managua, Mexico City, Panama City, San Jose, San Juan, San Salvador, Santo Domingo, and Tegucigalpa. The people involved in the project include the mayors and their staff in each of the ten cities, in particular specialists in various areas of urban development and management.

Objectives
There is an urgent need for improved urban development and management knowledge. Millions of people live in capital cities in Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean region. The quality of their lives depends on the ability of these municipalities to deliver an array of services. The quality of these services in turn depends on the ability of the municipal staff to understand issues, analyze problems, and apply both established and creative solutions.

Increase the capability of municipalities through collaboration

The objective of the program is to improve the quality of life of all city dwellers by improving municipal effectiveness and efficiency in each of the cities involved. It is to help the mayors and their staff develop creative solutions to common problems and challenges faced by municipalities in the region. To achieve this goal, they need:

access to world-class knowledge in various areas of urban services
access to others with similar experience
a set of methods and tools applicable to their situations
a forum for debating the merits and local applicability of various solutions

The approach of the initiative has been to build a constellations of communities of practice, each focused on an urgent topic related to the domain of urban administration in the region.

Develop a new model for capability building

In addition to the local objective of helping cities in the region learn from each other and develop their capabilities, the initiative also has the longer-term objective of developing a new model for knowledge creation and transfer. This new model does not assume that expertise only reside in development organizations such as the World Bank and has to be bestowed on developing countries. Rather it recognizes that there is a lot of expertise in these countries already and that it is by combining everyone’s knowledge and perspective that the best results can be achieved. This is a way to ensure that the knowledge that each country receives is relevant to its unique circumstances.

In order to make this new model available to others, the leaders of the initiative are emphasizing the need to articulate the processes, activities, roles, and other critical success factor in such a way that the system can be reproduced in other regions.

Resources
The success of the initiative depended on the originators’ ability to line up an array of resources.

An initiative based on partnership
Since its inception, a central theme of the initiative has been “partnership.” Several organizations joined forces with the participating cities to bring to the table the different types of resources necessary for the success of the project, including financial resources, facilities, personnel, domain knowledge, and process knowledge.

The World Bank provided overall coordination.

The Central America, Mexico and Caribbean chapter of the Union of Capital Cities of Ibero-America (UCCI) was the regional partner. Founded in 1982 in Madrid, UCCI has as its mission to promote ties among cities and conduct studies of issues that affect municipalities in Spanish-speaking regions.

The participating cities contributed their staff and took turn hosting meetings.

Several other local organizations contributed expertise and personnel to meetings when it was deemed useful.

The British and Dutch governments provided a total of $249,000 in funding through their international development departments.

Domain and process knowledge resources
The Thematic Groups at the World Bank were a crucial resource in contributing both domain and process expertise to the Ayuda Urbana communities as they formed and developed.

Experts from various Thematic Groups—such as City Development Strategy, Disaster Management, Municipal Finance, Urban poverty, and Urban Transport—participated in workshops when their expertise was relevant to the topic. The Thematic Groups also contributed to the development of material for the website.

The experience of the Bank with communities of practice also provided much-needed process knowledge on how to use communities of practice to develop and share knowledge. Roberto Chavez, the Ayuda Urbana project leader at the World Bank, had been a member of the knowledge-management team that had coordinated the Bank’s own communities-of-practice initiative. In addition, he was himself for a long time the leader of one of the most successful Thematic Group within the Bank, the Urban Services to the Poor. This experience in cultivating communities of practice from the inside and from the outside was critical to the success of the Ayuda Urbana project.

Activities
The idea of the initiative had its origin in conversations about inter-city capability building between Hector Silva, mayor of San Salvador and chair of the Economic Development Committee of UCCI/CAMC, and urban specialists from the World Bank. These conversations had started as early as June 1999.

Preparation and launch

By early 2000, Robert Chavez and his colleagues were working on forging the partnership that could give birth to the project. They secured the funding. They worked very closely with the cities involved and with the UCCI/CAMC, consulting with the mayors and municipal staff to define the objectives, the process, and the responsibilities. Their project proposal was approved by the council of mayors in September 2000.

The approach they proposed was to create communities of practice that would take advantage of the knowledge available among the dozens of urban specialists in the participating cities. The participants identified key issues, questions, and problems they shared, and selected eight topics that represented the most urgent challenges they were facing:

e-government
urban upgrading
environmental sanitation
municipal finances
urban transportation
renovation of historical city centers and poverty alleviation
disaster prevention/management
integrated urban development

In the end, they started communities of practice for the first seven of these topics. Different cities volunteered to take charge of coordinating one or two of these communities.

Thematic workshops

The communities of practice were officially launched through a series of two-day workshops, each focused on one of the topics. These took place every 2-3 months in different cities. Each workshop brought together: about 30 people from the participating cities, mostly specialists in the topic

a few World Bank Thematic Group members with relevant expertise
members of other organizations as appropriate
a team from the World Bank to facilitate the meeting.

The workshops were very interactive. Their purpose was to:

create an initial forum to develop relationships and trust through face-to-face interactions among participants
give a chance to each participating city to share their experience
engage participants in a discussion of lessons learned based on presentations by World Bank experts
establish a prioritized list of the most pressing issues and most frequently asked questions
introduce web-based tools for use in providing an ongoing learning process and train participants in the use of the system
choose a person to coordinate the collection of resources to be shared via e-mail and the website.

Online conversations

One of the web-based tools made available was an online conversation forum intended to give participants the opportunity to discuss issues, ask questions, share relevant information, and stay in touch. For example, someone raised the question of how to price waste management services. A member from San Salvador explained how the price of such services was determined in his city and posted this information for all other members to learn from.

Website for sharing resources

The project has created an interactive website that serves as a repository for the seven communities of practice. The resources on the website are available to the public. They are intended as a resource for all Spanish-speaking administrators who could benefit from them. The website’s contents include:
a library of “structured collections” of “knowledge objects” relevant to each of the topics. These are organized for two types of audience:

FOR POLICY MAKERS AND ADMINISTRATORS: description of the topic, its importance, the issues involved.
FOR PRACTITIONERS: The nuts and bolts of the practice, processes from start to implementation, lessons learned, case studies, and tools.
a series of downloadable manuals
a glossary of relevant terms and concepts
links to resources, including bibliographic references and websites
links to municipalities and other relevant organizations and agencies
workshop proceedings and presentations
directories of communities of practice

Evaluation

The initiative contracted with an external agency to conduct a formal evaluation of the program. This has enabled the participants to reflect on their experience and achievements and has given legitimacy to their work.

The evaluation methodology included interviews with coordinating groups, experts, and participants, as well as evaluation of material and website. In March 2002, the team organized an additional two-day workshop with participants from the ten cities to review the evaluation, reflect on the knowledge-sharing initiative, and articulate what they had learned. Overall, the feedback was extremely positive.

Plans for ongoing activities

The project is now trying to ensure its sustainability by mobilizing resources from a variety of institutions. The plan includes follow-up workshops for each of the existing communities of practice as well as the formation of four new communities of practice on further topics of relevance to cities in the region.

Institutionalization and hand-over

Adoption of the project by UCCI/CAMC was approved at a Plenary Session in May 2002. The Municipal Councils of participating cities have also endorsed the project and agreed to integrate it into the annual plans for their respective municipality. The cities are to alternate taking the coordinating role for the communities and managing the website, hosting it and developing new content.

In July 2002, operations were handed over to a team managed by the local association of mayors (UCCI/CAMC). To enable the transition, the World Bank provided the new team with training in web and content management.

Creating a model

A parallel stream of activities addresses the goal of creating a model of development that can be replicated in other regions. These activities, undertaken by the World Bank team, include:

document the overall process
codify the workshop methodology
create templates for activities and website resources
establish competence profiles for community coordinators and contents and web managers
develop a set of evaluation criteria and monitoring indicators
outline a strategy for promoting the program to other potential beneficiaries

Output and Results
The Ayuda Urbana initiative has had a significant impact on cities in the region and beyond as well. The benefits are evident in both tangible and less tangible ways.

Active communities of practice

The initiative has given birth to seven active, ongoing communities of practice, bringing together 128 members from 10 cities. This in itself is a significant result that enables:

ongoing communication among practitioners and experts
direct contacts with counterparts in the region
mutual help in problem solving
identification of special expertise and resources available within the community
ongoing gathering of knowledge resources made available to everyone via the website
Improved municipal administration

The project has generated the type of knowledge that urban specialists need and can use in their daily work, because it is developed, managed and distributed by them. They report that the process has resulted in:

improvement in their knowledge of their specialty
better decision making
more efficient services
more creative solutions to problems
subtle benefits

The initiative has also had benefits that are perhaps less tangible but no less significant:
a realization of common issues that create a bond among participants
a feeling of connection and pride among urban practitioners that is contributing to their sense of professional identity
an enhanced sense of regional municipal identity
These subtle effects of the project will contribute to strengthening the commitment to mutual responsibility and the willingness to help each other.

A sustainable program

The project has resulted in a self-sustaining learning system. It was developed to the point were the local partners were prepared to take over the responsibility for continuing the program. The benefits of the program were evident enough that the municipalities were ready to include it in their own annual plans. This local takeover is perhaps the most significant sign of success of the initiative.

Replication in other regions

The program has already generated interest in other parts of the world where it has inspired similar initiatives:
The Andean chapter of the UCCI is in the process of replicating the program among their capital cities.
The mayors of capital cities are often chairs of local associations of municipalities. There is interest in replicating the program at the national level in each country connecting smaller cities into local communities of practice.
China is now starting an effort to link hundreds of municipalities on a model inspired by Ayuda Urbana.
In India, similar project is starting on a smaller scale.
Members from the original team of Ayuda Urbana coordinators from the World Bank are now advising the teams working on these new projects.

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE ARE A VERY EFFECTIVE VEHICLE FOR LEARNING.
The highest value of the project resided in the communities of practice that linked practitioners in the various cities. These communities enable the development and sharing of knowledge with direct applicability to practice, because they connect peers who share similar responsibilities, concerns, and challenges, and enable them to learn from each other.

WHAT CONSTITUTES A “BEST PRACTICE” IS SUBJECTIVE.
Useful knowledge is not of the “cookie-cutter” variety. Local conditions require adaptability and intelligent application. A community is useful in this regard because it allows people to explore the principles that underlie a successful practice and discuss ideas and methods in ways that make them relevant to local circumstances.

DEVELOP AN ECOLOGY OF COMPLEMENTARY ACTIVITIES.
Learning in a community is best enabled by a variety of activities that enhance each other’s effectiveness as vehicles for developing and sharing knowledge.

RESPOND TO ACTUAL NEEDS OF PARTICIPANTS.
Always stay close to the needs of members. Engage in ongoing consultations and conversations, whether in planning events or in building resources.

ENGAGE PRACTITIONERS.
Provide assistance to enable members themselves to develop material and organize events. Over time distribute the work of coordinating communities.

BRING A VARIETY OF RESOURCES.
The process takes substantial resources to start with. These resources are diverse, including funding, time available, and facilities, but mostly consist in knowledge resources—knowledge of the process as well as the domain.

PREPARE FOR HAND-OVER.
Start with a lot of support, but be prepared to hand over the initiative. Develop local capabilities. This implies training people in operational responsibilities as well as convincing local authorities to take over the sponsorship of the project.

CONCLUSION

If Ayuda Urbana had only helped ten cities improve the quality of life of their citizens, it would be considered a significant success. But the importance of this initiative is not limited to the improvement it has brought to the capabilities of urban practitioners in the cities involved. It has created a model for knowledge creation and sharing that is already being replicated in several other regions and is applicable to many more regions and domains.

The initiative introduces a new model for knowledge transfer in development contexts, which points the way to a transformation of the way development projects are conducted. Because the model explicitly recognizes, gives voice to, and leverages local expertise, it implies a different relationship between so-called developed and developing countries. The target countries are not just recipients of ready-made knowledge handed down by experts from the outside. Rather they participate actively in building their own knowledge, using their own experience as well as the contributions of experts from development organizations.

For institutions like the World Bank, which must maximize the chances of success of the projects they support financially, the model has profound implications for their lending strategy. Learning systems that combine local and imported expertise by connecting developing countries into communities of practice create a ripe field for the successful use of development funds. They are most likely to generate creative, carefully crafted, and locally relevant solutions.

References and links
www.ayudaurbana.com the website created for the communities of practice, is publicly viewable, but it is in Spanish only.

www.worldbank.org the Bank’s website where one can read about Thematic Groups and their work. There is also a brief history of Ayuda Urbana.