Online urban-development training by and for African professionals

The Swiss government is sponsoring the African Cities Lab initiative to provide online training for urban-development professionals in Africa. EPFL is spearheading this initiative - which has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) - through its Excellence in Africa Centre, and has already signed up six partner organizations. The African Cities Lab aims to develop training programs in Africa, for Africa. The initiative comes in response to the extremely rapid growth of African cities and the ensuing need for urban planners trained in the challenges specific to those regions, especially in the areas of urban mobility, resource availability, energy management, water supply and sanitation, and the effects of climate change. The goal is to give urban planners the tools and insight to develop African cities as sustainably as possible. To that end, EPFL will develop a training platform with massive open online courses (MOOCs) that is intended specifically for urban-development practitioners in Africa; in a second phase of the project, the platform will be extended to students. The platform will be hosted at Sèmè City in Benin.