Africa Mobility Network Expands with New City-Regions at Dakar Meeting

On 17-18 September in Dakar, Senegal, the GCRO, in partnership with the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona and CETUD, hosted the final in-person meeting of the Africa Mobility Network project "Mobility in African City-Regions." The 4 participating city regions are Dakar, Maputo, Gauteng, and Barcelona. The meeting in Dakar was an exciting moment as we expanded the network by including new city-regions Douala, Nairobi, and Abidjan.

The meeting provided an opportunity to experience the BRT system in Dakar and reflect on the achievements of the project. Members felt that:

• The network provided a valuable space for mobility practitioners to make friends and share more openly about their work for meaningful learning.
• In-person meetings were deemed to be invaluable as they exposed the group to different contexts and allowed for meaningful relationship-building.
• Members felt that the network has assisted in developing a sense of togetherness knowing that in all contexts practitioners are dealing with similar issues.

Our meeting hosts CETUD displayed the incredible mobility and transport advancements that have been made in Dakar over the past 2 decades under the leadership and stewardship of Cham and Thierno.

As part of our time in Dakar we were invited to join an open mobility discussion on mobility in Dakar organised by CETUD. A few take aways for mobility governance in African City-Regions:

• transport authorities have an important role to play and need to be clearly established, funded and capacitated and professionalised.
• Improvements are not achieved overnight, there must be a long-term vision.
• Working with paratransit services must be at the core of mobility solutions in Africa, this creates the basis for transformation and the introduction of new services like BRT.

As the Africa Mobility network, we are working towards finalising our project report and beginning the next phase of the Africa Mobility network. A big thanks to Lamine and Nancy Seck and CETUD for organising an excellent meeting.