More people now live in the world’s cities than ever before, putting cities and their leaders on the frontlines of addressing global challenges. Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation program focuses on bolstering local governments’ abilities and ambitions by strengthening their capacity to harness data, solve problems, and better serve residents.
Replicating Proven Solutions Across Cities
While cities often face many of the same challenges, it can be difficult for them to identify, evaluate, and replicate effective policy solutions developed elsewhere. For more than a decade, Bloomberg Philanthropies has led efforts to make idea sharing and replication between cities a standard practice.
At Bloomberg CityLab 2024 in Mexico City, we welcomed Mayor Norton of Rochester, MN, Mayor Sayegh of Paterson, NJ, and Mayor Lagnada of Butuan City, Philippines, to discuss their cities’ Mayors Challenge projects.
SPOTLIGHT
Global Mayors Challenge
Bogotá, Colombia
Provided support services for women to ease the burden of unpaid caregiving.
Freetown, Sierra Leone
Restored 2,500 acres of tree coverage with monetary incentives for tree-planting.
Rourkela, India
Provided women food vendors with solar-powered cold storage that increased their income by 62%.
Phoenix, AZ, USA
Helped over 350 residents get jobs through a mobile career van for job seekers without internet access.
Strengthening City Leadership
In July 2024, Mike spoke to the eighth class of mayors in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.
City leaders are under pressure to deliver solutions to increasingly complex problems – but unlike the private sector, they have not traditionally had access to leadership development opportunities.
Recognizing this unmet need, we brought together Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School to launch an executive education program, serving 314 mayors and 554 of their senior staff since 2017. We also launched sibling programs in Israel and Africa – and are launching a new European city leadership initiative with the London School of Economics and the Hertie School in Berlin in the fall of 2025.
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314mayors and 554 senior staff provided with executive leadership training
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3sibling programs launched to train city leaders in Israel, Africa, and Europe
Using Data to Improve Residents’ Lives
In October 2024 in Mexico City, we brought together more than 700 mayors, policymakers, and urban experts for our eleventh annual Bloomberg CityLab summit, where Mike described the challenges and opportunities that cities are grappling with today.
Over the course of a decade, Bloomberg Philanthropies has built a global movement to embed data at the heart of how cities identify challenges and solutions, make decisions, evaluate progress, and look ahead. Building on this foundation, we lead a program with Johns Hopkins University called the City Data Alliance, which has provided 65 cities with in-depth coaching, data skills training, and technical assistance to strengthen city-wide data use.
SPOTLIGHT
Baltimore, MD
Created a data-driven task force that helped the city address 19,000 complaints about potholes, graffiti, and unpaved roads in less than two months.
Recife, Brazil
Launched a dashboard that is helping 800,000 residents access medications by providing real-time updates on their availability, filling a need for people managing chronic conditions.
Las Condes, Chile
Created an AI-powered platform to better deploy safety patrols and inspections, reducing home burglaries and commercial theft by 22% and physical assaults by 60%.
Montevideo, Uruguay
Responded to a water shortage by using data to understand where vulnerable residents live and roll out water distribution sites that delivered nearly 83,000 gallons of water.
In June 2024, we brought together 23 mayors in the third class of our City Data Alliance for coaching on best practices in data use at the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University.
A Fresh Approach to Solving Challenges
To help cities better understand and solve increasingly complex challenges, Bloomberg Philanthropies continues to foster creative problem-solving and innovation in cities. We support small teams of experts in data analysis, design, and project management – known as innovation teams, or “i-teams” – in city halls to help mayors tackle their biggest priorities and drive transformational change. To date, we have supported i-teams in 86 cities across nine countries. In 2025, we will launch i-teams in eight U.S. cities and up to 20 European cities.
SPOTLIGHT
Bogotá, Colombia
The Bogotá i-team took on the city’s water crisis, adapting an AI chatbot the team had helped create to share live updates with residents. They also redesigned a water utility bill to include behavior nudges to reduce consumption, which has reached an estimated 2.4 million households.
Reykjavík, Iceland
To cut down wait times for students to access behavioral support services, the Reykjavík i-team embedded resources in every school and developed a shared data model to align everyone supporting each child. As a result, the quality of support has gone up and wait times have fallen by 75%.
Helping Secure U.S. Infrastructure Support
After the United States rolled out historic federal infrastructure funding, we recognized that few small and mid-sized cities and towns had the capacity to navigate the competitive grant application process. To meet this need, Bloomberg Philanthropies worked with partners to launch the Local Infrastructure Hub, which provides webinars and in-depth grant-writing bootcamps to help identify funding opportunities, craft strong applications, and secure support.
To date, the Local Infrastructure Hub has served more than 2,400 localities, the vast majority of which have fewer than 50,000 residents. They have won more than $4.6 billion in funding for infrastructure projects.