A new campaign designed to find the most promising solutions for fighting poverty in communities was launched at the Cities Against Poverty Forum in Dublin earlier this week.
The Cities Innovate Against Poverty campaign aims to highlight those cities most committed to finding innovative ‘smart city’ solutions to their challenges in fighting poverty.
Dublin is the first city to sign up for the initiative, and it is hoped that a minimum of 10 will be involved in the pilot project.
The joint partnership between Dublin City Council and Citymart.com will identify the challenges facing cities and devise technological solutions to fighting poverty.
The initiative will be enacted through a five-step process in which cities will present opportunities for innovations to improve the lives of their citizens. Then solution providers will submit their innovations for evaluation, the best solutions will be implemented as pilots, and the participating cities will exchange the results in Dublin in spring 2014 to make better investments and improve lives.
Commenting on the partnership, Peter Finnegan, director of the Office of Economy and International Relations at Dublin City Council, said: “Dublin is at the forefront of engaging in innovative partnerships with organisations and cities around the world to tackle the challenges that are faced by cities and their citizens.
“This initiative is a creative and dynamic collaboration between Dublin City and Citymart.com [and] will produce tangible results to improve the lives of citizens in partner cities, and allow us the opportunity to share our knowledge and experiences with cities across the globe.”
For its role in the process, Citymart.com will recruit cities, manage the call programme, support the participating cities, research and recruit high impact global solutions, provide technology platform and the evaluation process and will follow-up pilots. Dublin City Council will create and manage institutional alliances and attract and manage necessary sponsors.
Citymart.com was launched as a technology start-up in January 2011 to promote cities as real-life laboratories for civic services.
