Counting the Costs

Counting the Costs is a first-of-its-kind attempt to determine the city-level costs for urban areas to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, the UN’s global goal for inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities and communities. AidData has partnered with the Municipal Finance and Urban Economy branch of UN-Habitat, the UN’s agency for human settlement, to conduct this pilot study of the new methodology in cities across five countries—Bolivia, Colombia, India, Malaysia, and Sweden—that are representative of developed and developing contexts. In this report, we outline our reproducible methodology to systematically quantify the costs for cities of achieving SDG 11 across five thematic areas—housing, transportation, waste management, public spaces, and governance—and provide country briefs with our methodology's results for each country. In the next phase of our work, we hope to refine and scale the methodology to include other thematic areas and develop decision support tools that help cities maximize their resource allocation.

Funding: We thank the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) who provided seed capital to conduct the first phase of our research.