World Cities Day Webinar 2023

Joyati Das

Joyati is a senior international development professional, thought leader and human rights advocate with a focus on children and youth rights in diverse urban contexts. She brings over 25 years of experience in international development, humanitarian response, research and advocacy initiatives with large non-governmental organisations. She was the Senior Director leading the Centre for Urban Programs at World Vision International for over 10 years and the elected representative of the global children and youth constituent group at the Habitat III conference led by the UN where the New Urban Agenda was launched. Joyati currently leads the Evidence to Action Framework Project supported by Fondation Botnar at the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities as an Enterprise Principle Fellow.

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Speakers

Esther Muiruri

Esther is the founder of the Gold Ribbon Initiative, a youth-led non-profit committed to advocating for the well-being of children living with cancer in Kenya. She is a committed professional in the field of Disaster Risk Management and Environmental Planning and Management with an MSc in Intelligence Security and Disaster Management. She has extensive experience implementing Disaster Risk Reduction and Humanitarian Response programs and stakeholder policy engagement in Kenya and globally. She has contributed to the policy process of the SDGs and other UN frameworks. Esther is a Local2030 Coalition steering committee member for SDG localization co-chaired by the UN-Habitat and UNDP.

Kalpana Viswanath

Kalpana is the co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, a social enterprise that uses technology and data to advocate for safe urban spaces for women in more than 25 cities in India and globally. She led the Safe Delhi program for Jagori in close collaboration with the Delhi government to help build programs to address women’s safety. Kalpana has also been a consultant for UN Women and UN-Habitat on issues of gender and urban safety and she is a member of the Advisory Group on Gender Issues (AGGI) at UN-Habitat, a Board member of SLOCAT (a global network on sustainable mobility), the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime (ICPC), and the Executive Committee Chair for Jagori, a leading Indian feminist non-profit organisation.

Juan Carlos Muñoz-Mora

Juan Carlos is a professor at the School of Finance, Economics and Government of the Universidad EAFIT and associate researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). Economist from the University of Antioquia, with a Master's degree in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes and Ph.D. in Economics from the Free University of Brussels with a European Doctorate recognition from Pompeu Fabra University. Juan Carlos has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, USAID, IDB and UNICEF on issues of rural development, impact assessment in the rural sector and technological transformation in the rural sector of developing countries, among others.

Stephanie Butcher

Stephanie is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at Sheffield University, and Director of the BA Global Sustainable Development Programme. Research interests focus on global development and social justice- examining the production of inequalities within urban planning and practice, and the collective practices through which peripheralized groups mobilise against uneven development. She is the PI on the research project: Co-Constructing Neighborhoods for Diverse Young People: Civic Media Technologies for Equitable Urban Governance.

Daniel Uribe

Kathryn Scurfield

Kathryn is an Associate Director at Ecorys UK. She currently acts as the Programme Director and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Lead for the Healthy Cities for Adolescents Phase-II programme. Kathryn has over 14 years of experience in MEL and implementing projects across a range of social policy areas throughout East Africa and Southeast Asia. She has worked with a variety of stakeholders including the UK Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), the European Commission, USAID, Global Affairs Canada, various social enterprises philanthropic organisations, and NGOs.

Roi Chiti

Roi is an architect and urban planner with an MA in “Development and International Aid” and an MSc in “Land Use and Water Management”. He has been working with UN-Habitat since 2009 where he coordinated the substantive programme of three editions of the World Urban Forum (WUF) and was seconded to the Habitat III Secretariat, to lead the UN drafting team of the New Urban Agenda and coordinate all the relevant knowledge and policy dimensions feeding its final formulation. He also coordinated the main Global Advocacy Platforms at UN-Habitat from 2018-2019. Since 2020 he has been the Coordinator of the Andean Region and UN Habitat representative for Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela.

Mayor Óscar Escobar

Óscar is the Mayor of Palmira, a city of 354,285 situated in the Valle del Cauca in Colombia. After a successful campaign under the slogan There is another way, he became the youngest-ever mayor of his hometown. His priorities are to modernise the city, improve the infrastructure, and prevent violence. Óscar Escobar studied economics at the Universidad Icesi and holds a Master’s degree in public policy from the Universidad de los Andes. Prior to becoming Mayor of Palmira, he worked at the National Planning Department, and as an economic advisor to Senator Claudia López. In 2016, he returned to his home region to work with the Mayor of Cali, Maurice Armitage, as director of Municipal Planning and Information and Communication Technologies.