“Danang is a growing city and faces several challenges in water, energy, and food security management”, Mr. Ho Ky Minh, Danang City People’s Committee Vice Chairperson, said in his opening speech at the Urban Nexus Training and the training of trainers’ workshops in Danang, Vietnam.
The two workshops were held from 30 October to 2 November 2018 and conducted by two trainers from the German consultancy, Denkmodell GmbH using the “Design Thinking Method”. The Urban Nexus Training is interactive modular training on integrated resource management and introduces the Urban Nexus approach and specific tools for analyzing urban challenges embedded in the Global Agendas. The second workshop focused on training of trainers. It enabled participants to become trainers or improve their training experience, replicating the urban Nexus approach through interactive training. Approximately 50 participants representing national ministries and agencies, city-level agencies as well as training institutes attended the Urban Nexus Training Workshop and 20 of them went on to participate in the training of trainers’ workshop.
“These back-to back-workshops have been organized with the purpose of creating a favorable platform for local cities and bringing together experts to share their experience and measures of integrated urban management,” Mr. Ho Ky Minh added.
Ms. Nguyen Thanh Nga from the Department of Science, Education, Natural Resources and Environment under the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) hosted the Urban Nexus Workshops together with GIZ and expressed MPI’s interest in this approach. “The relevance of this training is to apply the urban Nexus as a tool to reach more integrated resource management and inter-institutional cooperation within the framework of the SDGs,” she said.
The circular economy and the Urban Nexus Approach were introduced in the Urban Nexus Training. Ms. Ruth Erlbeck and Mr. Ralph Trosse, respectively the Director and Technical Director of the Urban Nexus project, were interviewed by the moderator and the participants. This new workshop format allowed the participants to learn about the Nexus approach and best practices in an interactive manner. Municipal solid waste management and wastewater management, both major urban development challenges for Danang, were then discussed.
After analyzing those challenges, concrete solutions for selected Vietnamese cities were elaborated. The participants were provided with analytic tools to scrutinize their respective challenges, with a focus on inter- and intra- institutional cooperation vertically and horizontally. They learned how to identify stakeholders and pursue synergies between sectors, jurisdictions and technical domains, how to increase institutional performance, optimize services quality and contribute to greater resource efficiency in the context of a circular economy. The ways in which integrated planning helps to avoid poorly coordinated investments and underutilized infrastructure, as well as the relevance of cities for global agendas were also included in the content of the workshop.
The Training of Trainers workshop provided the participants with knowledge to improve their skills, how to deal with difficulties and techniques for organizing interactive training sessions. They also practised their training skills such as moderating discussions. Visualization techniques were provided.
The participants gave positive feedback on the workshops and those from training institutes expressed their intention to conduct Urban Nexus training in their own context within Vietnam.
The workshops were conducted in the framework of the GIZ “Integrated Resource Management in Asian Cities: The Urban Nexus” project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).