Start Date : 18 Feb 09   End Date : 19 Feb 09 Location: University of Cape Town, South Africa

Although the mandates of the research and technology institutes in most African countries purport to address national development, their efforts are often not well integrated at the sector level resulting in a lack of synergy, which undermines effective transfer between scientific discovery and technology development. Higher learning curricula, research priorities and polices need to be defined in accordance with the demands and needs arising from urban environmental and development changes. It is important to bridge the gap between teaching, research and practice through creating innovative learning systems that bring formal educational development opportunities to key urban stakeholders. This, in turn, would promote a stronger focus on education for sustainable urban development and address the current lack of skills and professional capacities to deal with climate change existing at national and local levels in Africa. A mechanism is also required that enables urban players to interact and access up to date information (tools and guidelines, resource packages, documents) and feedback on the global, regional, national and local level debates, initiatives and activities on the broad areas of sustainable urban development.

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) in collaboration with the Africa Center for Cities (ACC) and UN-HABITAT, through its Sustainable Urban Development Network (SUD-Net) are organizing a workshop to bring together; regional representatives from cities, education and research institutions, and existing networks dealing with urban development issues, as well as key partners from local governments involved in policy-making and practice in urban planning and development.  The workshop will help identify regional priorities that will set the agenda for the SUD-Net Africa and define ways of promoting information exchange and interactions within both the regional and the global SUD-Net networks.