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DiMSUR creates relevant and innovative tools to improve local, national and sub-regional capacities for reducing vulnerability and building the resilience of communities to natural and other hazards in the Southern African Region

City RAP: City Resilience Action Planning Tool 

The cityRAP tool trains city managers and municipal technicians in small to intermediate sized cities in sub-Saharan Africa to understand and plan actions aimed at reducing risk and building resilience through the elaboration of a City Resilience Action Plan. The main principle of the CityRAP is ownership by the local government. It is designed as an enabling rather than prescriptive tool. It is understood as a set of training, exercises and activities directed at municipalities that express demand in kick-starting the resilience action planning process.

The City RAP Tool seeks to put local governments and urban stakeholders in the driver’s seat of urban resilience planning in order to ensure capacity retention and use. The design of the tool allows local governments to adapt and implement it with minimal intervention from technical experts. It draws on practical methods to leverage local knowledge for understanding and planning resilience. These include local government self-assessments, participatory risk mapping exercises and cross-sectorial action planning—all of which can be undertaken by the local government engaging relevant stakeholders and most importantly the communities themselves.

The tool has already been conducted in 6 cities: Chokwe, Vilankulo and Mocuba in Mozambique, Zomba in Malawi, Morondava in Madagascar, and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

THE MAIN City RAP OUTCOME IS THE URBAN RESILIENCE ACTION PLAN (RAP)

The Urban Resilience Action Plan (RAP) is a key document guiding decision-makers to improve their city’s resilience and reduce risks. The RAP identifies specific issues and priorities according to the context and local realities. It defines the key actions to be implemented at short, medium and long term to overcome the identified challenges promoting close collaboration and coordination between sectors. The most important prerogative of the RAP is to be implementable (“what cannot be implemented does not exist”). DiMSUR supports the development and implementation of such plans among different municipalities through the provision of technical support, tools and training courses. The plan can also be used to feed the elaboration of other planning instruments and could become a strong fundraising instrument in the hands of the municipality.