Local Economic Acceleration through Partnerships (LEAP) is a Joint Venture of the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and Cities Alliance. The project aims to support global and national dialogues addressing the obstacles to investment in rapidly growing cities by creating avenues for public-private partnerships.

The project was implemented in four secondary cities of which two were in Ghana (Cape Coast and Agona Swedru) and two were in Uganda (Mbale and Gulu) in close collaboration with local and national governments in the two countries.

This report is a synthesis of the various reports for each of the four municipalities. Given the mutually beneficial relationship between local economies and the national economy, the report begins with a comparative analysis of the economic growth record of the two countries, focusing on their decades-long efforts at economic and social transformation. This includes trends and patterns in economic growth, employment, and urbanisation as well as the state of governance and decentralisation in each country.

In conjunction with other data and information on the development history of the two countries, the findings of the studies are generalised to explore how efforts by local governments can be complemented by policies and initiatives of central governments to enable infrastructure investment and the promotion of LED. The term “enablers,” in this context, refers to policy and institutional reforms as well as direct or indirect actions by the central government to support the aforementioned objectives.

Various options for financing infrastructure are reviewed, and the two chosen, public private partnerships and municipal bonds, are assessed for their pros and cons and how best to utilise them. Additionally, given the weak implementation record of the traditional process-driven approach to LED, a “New LED” framework is proposed and discussed.

New LED is based on three core pillars: economic development, social development, and infrastructure development. In this new framework, both hard and soft infrastructure play a central and mediating role between economic development and social development, and they indirectly serve the other aspects of local and national development, such as public administration, security services, and the administration of justice.

This is followed by a primer on “infrastructure,” which outlines the various forms of infrastructure in a developing-country context, their inter-dependencies, and why their contribution to economic development should not be taken for granted simply because they exist. Lastly, the “macroeconomics of local economies” is presented as a reminder of the indirect role the central government plays, through its macroeconomic policies, in enabling infrastructure financing and LED through such key macro-indicators as inflation, interest rates, and exchange rates.

Learn more about the national and local findings, recommendations and more, by reading the full report HERE