From Pilot to Practice: Competency-Based Capacity Development for Climate-Resilient Cities

Secondary cities in climate-vulnerable countries face rapid urbanisation but lack the local professional capacity to plan and deliver climate-resilient housing and urban development. Conventional capacity development rarely strengthens the institutional systems and sustained learning pathways that cities need.



UNDA17, a UN Development Account project led by UN-Habitat with IHS Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative, is piloting a competency-based framework in Belize and Zambia. It systematically maps skills gaps, builds co-designed learning pathways through government–university–professional association partnerships, and creates measurable, locally owned capacity tied to specific climate-resilience competencies.



By June 2026, the project will have completed Competency Needs Assessments and in-person training workshops in both countries. This session presents early implementation experiences - what the assessments revealed, what the training surfaced, and what the partnership model looks like in practice - not final outcomes, but honest lessons from an approach being tested in real cities.