Butuan City is one of 50 Champion Cities selected as finalists in the 2021 Global Mayors Challenge, a global innovation competition that identifies and accelerates the most ambitious ideas developed by cities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These 50 urban innovations rose to the top of a competitive pool of more than 630 applications from 99 countries, in the first-ever Global Mayors Challenge.
Butuan City is a highly-urbanized city located at the northeastern part of Mindanao, Philippines. It serves as the regional center of Caraga.
As a Mayors Challenge finalist, Butuan now advances to the four-month Champion Phase of the competition. From June through October,the 50 finalist cities will refine their ideas with technical assistance from Bloomberg Philanthropies and its network of leading innovation experts. Fifteen of the 50 cities will ultimately win the grand prize, with each receiving $1 million and robust multi-year technical assistance to implement and scale their ideas.
Grand Prize Winners will be announced in early 2022.
“These 50 finalists are showing the world that in the face of the pandemic’s enormous challenges, cities are rising to meet them with bold, innovative, and ambitious ideas,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and 108th mayor of New York City.
“By helping these cities test their ideas over the coming months, we will have a chance to identify cutting-edge policies and programs that can allow cities to rebuild in ways that make them stronger and healthier, and more equal and more just.”
Butuan proposes to create a catalytic mechanism along the agribusiness value chain ecosystem that will provide demand forecasts and create price prediction models linked to farmers’ planning of production.
“The pandemic has heightened our sense of food and nutrition insecurity. We felt the urgency to accelerate our city’s transformation from a net importer of vegetables to a net exporter. The I-ADAPT initiative radically improves the system of backward and forward linkages of resource and market accessibility of our agricultural sector. By doing this, we enable and empower our disadvantaged farmers and other value chain players,” said Butuan Mayor Ronnie Vicente Lagnada.
