KCCA HOSTS MAYORS MIGRATION COUNCIL

On March 25 2022, His Worship the Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago hosted a delegation from the Mayors Migration Council at City Hall. The delegation included Mr. Samer Saliba, the Head of Practice and Ms. Helen Elizabeth Yu, the City Practice Manager at the Council.

The Mayors Migration Council is a Mayor-led advisory and advocacy organization that helps cities shape national and international policy on migration and displacement. The mission is to ensure that global responses to pressing challenges ranging from pandemics to climate change both reflect and address realities on the ground for the benefit of migrants, displaced persons, and the communities that receive them.

The Council is guided by a distinguished Leadership Board of city leaders from diverse geographies and migration contexts and the Kampala Lord Mayor His Worship Erias Lukwago is among them.

The platform lobbied for the Global Cities Fund to which Kampala City is a beneficiary. The Fund is the Mayors Migration Council’s response to the unmet needs of cities like Kampala as they support migrants, refugees, and internally displaced people.

With this support, KCCA will execute the "Kampala for All: Safety Nets for Recovery" project to offer immediate relief and an opportunity for sustainable economic recovery after the severe impact of Covid-19.

The project will reach out to refugees, migrants, and the urban poor providing support within low-income and informal neighborhoods in Kampala based on previous studies and area-based assessments. The project will also include knowledge-sharing engagements with other Ugandan cities to build a long-term resilience strategy through knowledge and burden sharing.

The delegation called on the KCCA Deputy ED Eng. David Ssali Luyimbazi who appreciated the effort the Council is putting in place to address the challenges arising from the migration crisis globally.

Luyimbazi told the delegation that Kampala is faced with a huge challenge of urban migration, which has led to increased informal settlements (slums) in the city.

Others members of the board of the Mayors Migration Council include; Marvin Rees of Bristol, UK, Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, United States, Guiseppe Sala of Mila, Italy, Valerie Plante of Montreal, Canada, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Yousef Al Shawarbeh of Amman, Jordan, Corine Mauch of Zurich of Switzerland and Georgios Kaminis, the former Mayor of Athens, Greece and Special Envoy MMC & C40.