About 21 per cent of the total population of Ethiopia lives in urban areas, which has rendered it as one of the least urbanized countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this low level of urbanization, the country has one of the highest rates of urbanization even by the standards of developing countries, which is estimated at 4.1 per cent. A sneak peek into the first phase of the Urban Local Government Development Program (ULGDP) has shown great promise that this program will greatly impact the urban population in Ethiopia. As of July 2013, around 2.6 million people had benefited from the infrastructure and services financed under ULGDP.

Ethiopia is implementing the Second Urban Local Government Development Program (ULGDP II) until end of December 2019 with the support of the World Bank. The ULGDP II project primarily aims to enhance the institutional performance of participating urban local governments in developing and sustaining urban infrastructure and services. It is envisaged that the ULGDP II will consolidate and expand the achievements of the first phase by providing grants to Urban Local Governments (ULGs) based on their performance across a range of areas including fiduciary management, asset management, revenue generation, management of environmental and social systems, planning and budgeting practices, execution of planned operations and maintenance, governance, transparency and participation, among others.

In addition, the UIIDP that was approved by the World Bank has succeeded ULGDP II and it is expected that in its operations and processes it will use similar systems as the ULGDP II with modifications in regard to financing of federal activities through the Investment Project Financing (IPF) and additional DLI for regions as well as additional performance indicators. The UIIDP primarily objective is to enhance the institutional performance of participating Urban Local Governments (ULG’s) to develop and sustain urban infrastructure, services, and local economic development and consists of the provision of performance-based grants to ULGs for eligible Investments and support to achieve Program results at the regional level on capacity building, financial audit, procurement audit and environmental and social safeguards audits. The program has an additional 73 cities to the existing 44 cities making a total of 117 cities that are participating in the program. This substantial scale-up to 117 cities brings about greater impact in terms of population coverage and size of the Program and result in exponentially larger positive impact for the country.

It is against the above brief background that the Ministry of Urban Development and Construction under the ULGDP II Project contracted AH Consulting to provide Technical Assistance for design of the ULGDP II & UIIDP Management Information System that supports the program’s operations at the federal, regional and ULGs levels (44 cities).