Applied training allows students and practitioners to put classroom principles into practice in real-world settings. Immersive training at the Africa Urban Lab challenges students and practitioners to work together and find innovative solutions to problems in their own cities and beyond.
Urban leaders, city managers, and urban-focused professors at universities have an outsized influence on the future of African cities. City leadership and management are the decision-makers; through their decisions they shape the priorities, incentives, and actions of their municipal organizations. Similarly, professors focused on cities teach the next generation of urban officials. By ‘training the trainers’, the AUL can have an outsized impact, affecting whole municipal agencies and entire cohorts of fresh urban graduates.
Many city officials aren’t able to take significant time off work or have other barriers that prevent them from enrolling in longer-term educational programs. Yet these same officials would still benefit immensely from participating in capacity building exercises. The AUL’s short trainings bring the learning to busy city officials. These trainings are bespoke and intensive. The AUL team works closely with municipal leadership to determine the scope and focus of the desired trainings, tailors the curricula to meet these needs, and then delivers these trainings at the officials’ own location.
New practices and learnings often require ongoing reinforcement in order to take root. The AUL focuses on building a ‘community of practice’ that regularly engages in knowledge exchange, shares best practices, and communicates the latest findings to a network of urban-focused professionals and officials across Africa.