With the financial support of the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC), the Cities Alliance, legally hosted and administered by UNOPS, has convened a Joint Work Program (JWP) to enable partner cities, local governments, host communities and migrants in Tunisia to manage challenges and leverage opportunities arising from migration to cities, for sustainable and inclusive development.

The Cities and Migration JWP aims to generate new knowledge, promote analytical and collaborative approaches to key urban issues. It also aspires to become a local, national, and international coordination platform, knowledge hub and think tank for advocating new thinking on migration.

The JWP’s activities are centered around four areas:

Cities and inclusive migration governance: Activities in this area aim to provide data on urban migrants, evidence-based knowledge products, and supported pilot initiatives that enable local authorities to advance the management of urban migration and integration of migrants and social cohesion.
Cities and labor migration: For this area, activities seek to provide data, evidenced-based knowledge products, and supported pilot initiatives on labor migration to improve the capacity and mandate of local authorities and key support partners to receive, manage, and integrate labor migrants.
Cities and forced migration: Activities for this area aim to improve data and evidence-based knowledge products for improved management of urban crisis migration, as well as supporting pilot initiatives to demonstrate advanced approaches to migration crisis management.
Global partnership and advocacy: Activities in this area will facilitate cooperation and peer-learning among Cities Alliance members and partners. They will also support  global cooperation, partnership, and advocacy for safe, orderly and regular migration.

Within this framework, the Cities Alliance JWP on "Cities and Migration" will support stakeholders for the cities of Kairouan and Jendouba in the following subject area: demonstrate an advanced approach on the reception, management, and integration of labor migrants with a focus on local governance mechanisms.

Both Kairouan and Jendouba are secondary cities in the hinterlands of Tunisia, which over the years have received significantly less investment than the country’s coastal areas. These cities need economic reforms in order to create jobs and address growing social dissatisfaction, but the economic situation is challenging. The cities need to attract investors, but they cannot compete with the large coastal cities which benefited from greater state support over the last decades. 

Both Jendouba and Kairouan have experienced a major out-migration over the past decades as residents with capital and skills relocated to the attractive, vibrant coastal cities. However, the populations of both cities have remained roughly the same thanks to migrants from rural areas. Priorities remain attracting investment, building local entrepreneurship, leveraging the skills of the former rural population, and efforts to increase the attractiveness of the cities as a place to live.

For this reason, projects with the aim to increase the attractiveness of the cities as a place to live and invest are of special interest. 

The overall objective is that the pilot projects will support local authorities and key partners in each city to build institutional capacities, evidence-based approaches, and a mandate to receive, manage, and integrate migrants.
Proposed pilot interventions need to include multi-stakeholder forums to foster integration and social cohesion. Moreover, pilot projects need to enhance capacities at the local level to integrate migration into city development approaches, and they must develop knowledge products and disseminate them at the local, national and global level.

The deadline for proposals submission is the 18th of August 2019, and the provisional funding allocation for a pilot project for each city is up to USD 400,000.

Click here to know more about this grant opportunity.

Info and photo sources:
https://www.citiesalliance.org/jwp-cities-and-migration-partner-cities-and-countries
https://unhabitat.org/preparing-cities-in-tunisia-to-monitor-and-report-on-goal-11/
https://www.unops.org/tunisia

This document was produced by DARPE www.darpe.me, July, 2019.