4.1 Support MAB’s regular operational activities to represent all the municipalities in Bangladesh and uphold their rights:

With partial support from UNDP, MAB HQ will mobilize the regional committees to come forward and meet regularly so that together the mayors can be a bigger part of national and local level policy changes towards a poverty free urban Bangladesh. In connection to this thought, after listing the major roles of MAB categorically, quarterly meetings from regional to central levels are needed to be organized in such manners that it will represent all the municipalities in the country. These will include following sub-activity:

·        Complete recruitment process for the positions as agreed by UNDP/MAB and places the officials with necessary arrangement of accommodation, logistics and secretariat supports for taking over the responsibilities derived from the activities at large.

·        Review and update the ToR where applicable in a more realistic manner for the regional committees a list of major operational activities of MAB with its eleven regional bodies to facilitate its effective systemic role of representation of all the municipalities in the country upholding respective rights.

·        Categorize the activities in order to the respective priority to be orderly addressed aiming at achieving better MAB roles as per the laid objectives developing urban local governance.

·        Help systemic formation of MAB regional committees and supports to be functional as per mandate

·        Support organize quarterly meetings of MAB system from the regional to central levels and bringing the development and rights issues of concern forward to the national level for due attention. All the meetings must be recorded with meeting minutes approved by all legitimate members and preserve the minutes electronically so that it can be accessed anytime when required by the members.

4.2 Develop and enable online system through MAB’s website to store information, database for all the municipalities in Bangladesh:

A main database platform will be developed to collect, store and analyze information through MAB’s website. All the municipalities of Bangladesh will provide information in an online-based system. Capacity and User interface of the MAB’s website need to be assessed and if needed will be improved further.

·        Arrange IT supports to improve MAB website and link the data center with the web interface.

·        Develop datacenter and necessary interfaces for the municipalities so that they can enter the required data through online and store in the datacenter. Collection of information from the municipality should be robust meaning that it should be easily handled but secured, it can be easily updated, it can directly feed the data to the dashboard of MAB website, etc. There will be some generic information and some specific intervention-based information. MAB will also try to build formal partnership with A2i project of Government of Bangladesh and UNDP to better facilitate the process and get the results.

·        Make a priority list of contents like information on the roles and status of Municipalities, urban local governance, contextual demands on major urban issues, poverty status/pockets, trend of rural-urban migration and major causes with regional variations that are expected to be available through the MAB website.

·        Develop guidelines and orient the focal persons at the municipalities on the improved online systems and get the municipalities started the data feeding

4.3 Organize a series of webinars (at least 4) with participation of municipal mayors and document the lessons learned on nCOVID impact by the MAB members for policy advocacy:

Municipal Association of Bangladesh (MAB) will organize a series of webinars on the nCOVID-19 impact in participation with the municipal mayors and a few selected high-level government officials/ministers.  The lessons from each participating municipality will be discussed and presented by the mayor in the webinar. These lessons will be documented to reflect the report which will later be used for policy advocacy.

·        Participating mayors and other members will be discussing what they have done so far to tackle the nCOVID-19 at the local level, what challenges they have faced, how they have overcome the challenges, how the national initiatives helped to face the challenges at the local level, what more initiatives needs to be taken by the central government to support effective prevention of the nCOVID-19 and how the livelihoods of the urban poor can be restored in the city, etc. The discussion points should be published in the local and national media, for which MAB needs to engage journalists during these webinars. The engagement of journalists should be as many as possible in numbers to maximize media coverage. 

·        Upon completion of the webinars and after publishing the news in different newspapers/media, MAB will prepare a scrapbook containing the news/media coverage and will submit to the LIUPCP. Each of the Webinar sessions is expected to be 2-3 hours long. The Webinar session will be moderated by some renowned senior journalists. 

·       After completing all the webinars, MAB will prepare a report based on the discussions and the findings of the webinars with some policy recommendations, which will later be used for policy briefing. Therefore, in a single webinar, it is expected that the following participants will be present and actively participate in the discussion: (i) Mayor-10/12, (ii) Minister / Sr. Bureaucrat - 1/2, (iii) Sr. Journalist as Moderator - 1, (iv) Journalist (to take notes for news) - 15/20, and (v) representative from MAB Executive body-1/2.