The 10th World Urban Forum (WUF) took place on February 8–13, 2020, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. More than 17,000 participants from more than 168 countries attended the high-level gathering on urban issues.

WUF10 is hosted by UN Habitat. This year’s theme is Cities of Opportunities: Connecting Culture and Innovation. The event is broken into six dialogues sessions focused on emerging innovative approaches and practices in harnessing culture and innovation as drivers for sustainable urbanization and the linkages between urbanization, culture, and innovation as a basis for achieving inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities and human settlements. Banyan Global participated in a panel hosted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), a Sweden-based think tank, on February 9 titled, Achieving Cities for All: Planning for and with Women and Girls.

Banyan Global consultants Ruta Aidis and Delila Khaled spoke about their work on the USAID-funded Women’s Economic Empowerment and Equality Technical Assistance (WE3 TA) task order. They discussed the findings and recommendations from the WE3 TA’s women’s economic empowerment and equality analysis of the solid waste management and recycling sector. The geographic scope of the analysis is global, with a specific focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. Country-level analyses of the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Peru were based on key stakeholder interviews and documents review.  Specifically, Ms. Aidis and Ms. Khaled highlighted that empowerment of women in this sector is needed at every level of the value chain; requires comprehensive and long-term awareness and behavior change campaigns across multiple areas; depends on women acquiring access to capital, market data, equipment, transportation, and training to advance their positions in the value chain; and requires that actors at all levels of the value chain work together to adopt and enforce harassment-free workplace policies.

The full report, global factsheet, and Latin America and Caribbean factsheet are available on Banyan Global’s website.