United Cities and Local Governments for Africa is the umbrella organization and united voice and representatives of local governments across the continent. UCLG Africa gathers 40 national local government associations from all five regions, as well as the 2,000 cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants. This means the organization represents nearly 350 million African citizens. As a membership-based organization, UCLG Africa supports its members through research, knowledge sharing, training, and capacity building delivered through its pilots initiatives and flagship projects. We had all key stakeholders. The farmers, the business people, universities, civil society organization, trade union all of them coming at Africities to take advantage of this platform, to try and give flesh to what we call, agenda 2063. We were treated in 10 years ago as nobody. Now we are on the map and nobody can dare talking development without talking to local governments. Number two, we made sure that local governance is key in the political agenda of this continent. And we succeeded to convince our head of state and government to adopt an African Charter on values and principles of decentralization. We also are very keen to working on youth empowerment in terms of proposal of jobs to the youth. And this is why we launched a pilot project on local entrepreneurship. This pilot project, we run it in Ghana and in Senegal, City of Accra and City of Dakar. And it shows that most of the LEDs program that are run with the support of donors are not addressing the root cause of unemployment and lack of entrepreneurship in Africa. And the pilot showed us that unless you have the capacity to go to the market and have investors interested in your business, there is no way you can encourage job creation and entrepreneurship in cities. [Foreign] All the 17 sustainable development goals are important. They are so important to me as a woman, because among the 17 SDGs I must prefer SDG number five: Gender equality. But I can tell you that it is a goal that must be considered in a cross-cutting manner since all the 16 goals are related to women. "No hunger." Who feeds mankind? It's women who do so. The fight for food security? It's women who do so. Sustainable water and sanitation. It's the mother who does the laundry, she is the one who cooks, and cleans the house. Gender equality is therefore a goal that one should read in a cross-cutting manner, because it places women at the center of sustainable development. If the local officials, the mayors who are included in the 11th and in the 5th goals are respected, I can reassure you that the desired goals in terms of the fight against and eradication of poverty will be reached. ALGA is currently working within the framework of a 2017-2021 strategic plan targeting 10 priority projects. The first goal is to embed a strategic vision. We are talking about capacity building and training. These are very complex processes, requiring a holistic vision, a strategic vision and an inclusive vision that involve both the members of UCLG Africa, the beneficiaries of our activities, and or partners. This is the purpose of the 2017-2021 strategic plan. We also aim to anchor inclusive, transparent and participatory governance in the management of this academy by involving all relevant actors and stakeholders. Our ambition is to launch by September 2017 at least three colleges: local leadership, participatory budgeting and territorial coaching. And we are working on other colleges that focus on topics of interest to local authorities or related to the current context like for example concerning the localization of the SDGs, the Urban Agenda, and climate change. We called as African, for a window for local governments in the Green Climate Fund. And we said that we need a program to prepare our member's Local Authorities to get eligible requests tabled to the Green Climate Fund. And this program should be run in between 2017 to 2020 so that when the Green Climate Fund is in operation 2020, we are ready to also table our requests so that we avoid what happened with the Kyoto protocol.
