I recently founded UrbanBetter, an Africa-led global social enterprise working to accelerate building of healthy sustainable cities through advocacy, practice and learning.
Our advocacy pillar is Cityzens, a youth-led citizen science-driven movement. Cityzens use physical activity, wearable sensors and a mobile app to capture dynamic data on urban spaces and places that influence the air we breathe, we ways we move for work/play and the food we eat. They use the data they generate to inform advocacy campaigns engaging the public and decision makers to increase the demand for healthy sustainable urban environments, the meaningful inclusion of youth in urban decision making, and the mainstreaming of science in society (we call this “”precision-activism””). We are now growing this initiative, building the digital (app, data visualisation platform, training platform) and social infrastructure to ensure we can deploy as a scalable data-driven, tech-enabled advocacy solution with the audacious goal of reaching 100,000 Cityzens across 100 cities in the next 10 years (gulp!).
Our scaling model under development is as a social franchise with Cityzens Hubs hosted by locally registered NGOs. We’ve launched the first Hub in Lagos and I’m so completely bowled over and excited by how the youth have really owned and run (pun fully intended!) with this that I want to share this with fellow Campers. For eg in June, they organised a running relay advocacy campaign to share the findings from the citizen science experiment they designed and ran in May, and mobilised over 300 people including government representatives all while encouraging healthy behaviour in public space (my slides will essentially be videos showing what the youth have done and the power of this approach; check out posts on Instagram: @urbanbetter.science).
I am a sole founder and actively looking for thinking and doing partner(s) with complementary skills to conspire with me to accelerate and maximise the impact of this Africa-led global initiative.
