Bloomberg Philanthropies has announced the 15 smart city winners of the Global Mayors Challenge, which will each receive $1m and multi-year technical support.

The 15 cities are Amman, Jordan; Bogotá, Colombia; Butuan, Philippines; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Hermosillo, Mexico; Istanbul, Turkey; Kigali, Rwanda (pictured); Kumasi, Ghana; Paterson, New Jersey; Phoenix, Arizona; Rochester, Minnesota; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Rourkela, India; Vilnius, Lithuania; and Wellington, New Zealand.

The 2021-2022 Global Mayors Challenge is the fifth edition of the worldwide innovation competition that supports and spreads cities’ most promising ideas. These 15 winners are being recognised for designing the boldest and most ambitious urban innovations to emerge from the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The winning ideas address one or more of four current issue areas in cities: economic recovery and inclusive growth; health and wellbeing; climate and environment; and gender and equality. Each city will be awarded $1m in addition to technical support and coaching over three years to bring their ideas to life.

“As the world works to address the profound public health and economic effects of the ongoing pandemic, cities can implement innovative ideas at a pace that national governments simply can’t match,” said Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies. “Our fifteen winners offer bold, achievable plans to improve health, reduce unemployment, empower women and more. Collectively, they have the potential to improve millions of their residents’ lives, and the most successful will inspire cities around the world to embrace them.”

The 15 winning cities hail from 13 nations on six continents and collectively represent more than 30 million residents. They were selected from among 50 Champion Cities that spent the past four months working with residents to test and refine their projects rigorously. With the most applicants to date, mayors from 631 cities in 99 countries submitted their boldest ideas to the 2021-2022 competition, nearly twice the number of cities that applied to the most recent Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge in 2018.

The winners were selected based on vision, potential for impact, feasibility and transferability. The ideas provide a snapshot of the innovation priorities of hundreds of the world’s cities. The most common themes of the winning innovations focus on reducing unemployment, improving health and addressing climate change.

Four of the winning projects also have an explicit gender-equality lens.

Cities developed new ways to deliver city services to residents and approaches to combat the opioid epidemic. All of the submissions were generated in part through participatory processes with residents.

The 15 winning projects are:

Africa (20% of winning cities)

• Freetown, Sierra Leone: Create a vibrant new digital marketplace supporting tree maintenance and the urban canopy using digital technologies
• Kigali, Rwanda (pictured): Introduce a smart-waste system that improves sanitation and water quality in the city
• Kumasi, Ghana: Address waste-management and youth unemployment crises by training young people to install toilets

Asia-Pacific (20% of winning cities)

• Butuan, Philippines: Strengthen local food production by empowering farmers to make smarter decisions through a new agri-business model
• Rourkela, India: Provide cold-storage units to women co-ops to empower female food vendors, reduce food waste and increase access to fresh foods
• Wellington, New Zealand: Create a virtual twin of the city that helps residents to understand climate change impacts, promoting resident action

Europe (20% of winning cities)

• Istanbul, Turkey: Foster city-wide mutual aid through a programme that crowdsources contributions to meet basic needs for those in need
• Rotterdam, Netherlands: Use digital tokens to create incentives for local businesses to hire vulnerable residents
• Vilnius, Lithuania: Take lessons learned during Covid to create more resilient K-12 education models, especially those that tap the city as a classroom

South America (7% of winning cities)

• Bogotá, Colombia: Create care blocks that support female caretakers, shift more of the care burden to men, and shift more unpaid care work to paid care work

Middle East (7% of winning cities)

• Amman, Jordan: Map available public assets and service infrastructure to improve the city’s emergency response and infrastructure investments

North America (26% of winning cities)

• Hermosillo, Mexico: Create eco-friendly employment opportunities that benefit both the environment and underemployed women
• Paterson, New Jersey: Respond to residents struggling with opioid use disorder by fulfilling requests for lifesaving medication within 90 minutes through a coordinated effort among police, first responders, hospitals and pharmacies
• Phoenix, Arizona: Combat rising unemployment – especially among people lacking internet access – by creating mobile units that provide job seekers access to resources, training and opportunities
• Rochester, Minnesota: Bring more women of colour into high paying construction jobs by coordinating with contractors and facilitating trainings

The 2021-2022 challenge builds on the success of four previous Bloomberg Philanthropies challenges in the USA (2013 and 2018), Europe (2014), and Latin America and the Caribbean (2016). Thirty-eight ideas have won the Mayors Challenge since its launch in 2013 and often yield such powerful results that other cities replicate them.

This includes Providence Talks (2013, Providence, Rhode Island, USA), a project that aims to increase the number of words children from low-income families hear each day to support healthy brain development and prepare them for school, which is being implemented in five additional US cities.

In Biochar (2014, Stockholm, Sweden), a project to convert plant waste into biochar to encourage plant growth will be replicated in 16 additional European cities. And in Visor Urbano (2016, Guadalajara, Mexico), a programme that decreases corruption by creating transparency in the permitting process for new businesses and buildings will be replicated by 61 additional cities in Latin America.

“When it comes to solving issues of equality and access, people need people,” said Bloomberg Philanthropies board member Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments. “Each of the winning teams took a people-first, novel approach to improving their community. I am looking forward to seeing the long-term impact generated by these projects around the world.”

The 15 winning cities will now enter a three-year implementation period with a $1m grant and technical assistance. During this time, the cities will work diligently to evolve and scale their ideas into a real-life programme to improve residents’ lives. Cities will also work to share their ideas with additional cities around the world to enable these tested innovations to spread.

“The Mayors Challenge shows that there can be a positive legacy to emerge from all the hardship of the past two years, and that it’s happening in our cities,” said James Anderson, who leads the government innovation programme at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “Now we turn to help these mayors implement their ideas, evaluate and spread the ideas that produce big impact.”