Living in a city, one's daily experiences are increasingly shaped by a range of different actors, from local authorities to NGOs and private companies. How to make a city safe from violence is a question that governments can no longer answer alone.
All of those actors are, to some extent, involved in keeping city-dwellers safe: while it’s the government’s job to make sure streets are well-lit and roads are safe to walk on, it’s often private operators who run the transport system, or help residents navigate the streets using apps. NGOs may run programs that make sure certain marginalised groups, such as women and girls, aren’t left behind as cities grow.
Lisa Zengeni, a management consultant who specialises in localisation – the process by which cities use local insights and partnerships to implement the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals agenda – said collaborations between NGOs, regional governments and private actors are vital in building effective public policy programs in urban environments.
“Often governments have their own interests, corporates have their own interests and NGOs have their own interests,” she said. “Policies are often undermined because they’re not all coming together.”
“If we can build cities according to all these interest groups and have them lobby for certain interventions together, they’re more likely to be sustainable.”
Collaboration isn’t always straightforward, and forging partnerships with private entities can be the most challenging form of partnership, Zengeni said. The key for making public-private partnerships work, she said, is being flexible.
And when interests align, collaborating with private actors can be quick, efficient and provide demonstrable benefits for both parties. Here’s how two interventions designed to reduce violence against women and girls in cities used public-private partnerships to get results.
Collecting testimony to push for change
In 2016 the humanitarian organisation Plan International launched an app, Free to Be, that allowed women and girls to pinpoint locations in a city where they felt unsafe, or where they had experienced harassment, abuse or assault.
The app was part of Unsafe in the City, a project that highlights inequalities in the way women and girls experienced cities compared to men and boys.
When conceiving the project, Hayley Cull, director of advocacy and community engagement at Plan’s Australia office, said they realised they needed help from the private sector. Plan approached Crowdspot, a development company that specialises in maps, to help them build the app.
“We're not app developers,” Cull said. Meanwhile, “[Crowdspot’s] experience is in how to map and visualise experiences in cities. And so the subject matter was different and new for them but they had a really strong skill set in an area that we knew nothing about.”
The initiative began in Melbourne and Plan have since rolled it out in Sydney, New Delhi, Kampala, Lima, and Madrid. In those cities, they’ve collected more than 20,000 testimonies from women and girls about how they experience the urban environment. Cull says 90% of the incidents of harassment or assault they have recorded are not reported to the police.
Even if the vast majority of incidents aren’t followed up with authorities, Plan has still been able to use the data they’ve collected to push for change. Cull said the local government in Sydney is using the information collected on the app to implement a city-wide approach to improving safety for women and girls. In Kampala, she said the program had encouraged local authorities to improve lighting and to name unmarked streets to make it easier to report the location of incidences of abuse or harassment.
Across the six cities, Cull said it’s been vital for the team at Plan to be open to working with all kinds of partners, from universities to police departments, city councils and public transport authorities. In the private sector, she says the charity has been approached by the engineering firm Arup to use their data to build better lighting solutions as part of public projects.
“Stakeholders want to do the right thing, but they don't actually have the opportunity, the means or necessarily the will to listen directly to what girls and young women are experiencing,” she said. “As soon as we create that connection, put the data and stories in their hands and give them the chance to speak face-to-face with these girls and young women, it's absolutely transformative.”
“We would have achieved nothing if it hadn't been for a willingness to work in partnership with others,” Cull said.
Safer public transport in Marrakech
In Morocco, the local office of UN Women has been working with Spanish bus company ALSA since 2015 to bring down levels of violence against women on public transport in Marrakech.
There is a huge amount of work to do to keep women safe in public in a country where sexual harassment has been described as “endemic”. In 2017, a video of a group of boys assaulting a woman with learning difficulties on a bus in Casablanca while the driver and passengers ignored her pleas for help brought the issue of violence against women on public transport into greater focus.
The ALSA-UN Women program works in three parts. First, when drivers join the company, they attend a full session on deailng with sexual harassment as part of their intitial training.
Second, a section on violence against women and girls has been added to the yearly refresher training all drivers must receive.
Finally, animated awareness-raising videos are played on all ALSA buses in Marrakesh to educate passengers about the problem.
In training, drivers are taught to stop on demand for women after dark, to safely intervene where possible if they see a passenger being harassed and to direct victims to appropriate services if they have been assaulted.
At the beginning of the partnership, the staff at UN Women had thought that drivers would simply need advice on how to intervene, said Raphaëlle Rafin, programme analyst for UN Women in Morocco.
But during the first training session, they quickly realised that they needed to change attitudes too.
“What those training sessions revealed was that the first issue that we had was with mentalities. It was not that drivers did not have a way to respond – it was more the way they were approaching sexual harassment. In most cases, they were blaming women.”
Rafin says they now work on changing attitudes before showing drivers how to respond to harassment and assault.
By 2016, ALSA’s entire cohort of drivers —1410 men and one woman — had received some form of sexual harassment training. (Rafin says they are hoping to use the partnership to recruit more women drivers.)
Rafin says the collaboration was remarkably easy to get off the ground. “We just took a chance and sent an email to the director-general of the bus company,” she said. “Very quickly, the director responded positively.”
It was the first public-private partnership her office had attempted, she said, and it worked well in part because it did not require great financial investment from either side, being based on existing training programs ALSA offered.
The partnership presented a “win-win” scenario, she said – safer buses for women meant results for UN Women’s Safer Cities program, but it also meant more customers for ALSA, and a better reputation as a provider. Rafin pointed out that following their work with UN Women in Marrakech, ALSA went on to win a contract in the capital Rabat.
The programme has not been fully evaluated, Rafin says, but ALSA has reported an increase in drivers reporting incidences of sexual harassment and abuse to head office, which both partners are taking as an encouraging sign. — Megan Clement
(Picture credit: Riccardo Maria Mantero/Flickr)
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