Transport and Mobilities: Meeting the Needs of Vulnerable Population in Developing Cities

The proposed network offers a novel and ambitious rethinking of global transport challenges of developing cities from the perspectives of vulnerable citizens, whose needs at the street-level are often overlooked.

The primary aim of this 'Transport and Mobilities Network' is to build capacity for interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaborations between academics, policymakers, project funders and practitioners in the design and delivery of socially inclusive transport systems in four cities in the Global South: Cape Coast, Ghana; Dhaka, Bangladesh, Lagos, Nigeria and Kampala, Uganda. In particular, the network will draw academic and policy attention to the crucial role of transport can play in helping to address better personal mobility, reducing inequalities and create economic growth. and personal mobility The focus of the network is therefore on in developing cities in particular the severe plight of the challenges facing the most highly vulnerable members of the city communities, the urban poor, and especially women, young, elderly and disabled people.

Until now, social policy has tended to overlook the severe problems that are associated with the transport system in the rapidly expanding cities of Low Developed Countries (LDCs) and Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). As such, the severe and increasing threat to livelihoods of the inaccessibility of vulnerable populations to markets, employment and other goods and services remains largely unaddressed within their urban and social development policies. Equally, the need to protect citizens from negative health effects of life-threatening levels of exposure to traffic-related pollutions, increased deaths and casualties from road traffic accidents and whole communities from severance by major new transport projects remains largely absent from transport or health planning.

Network activities, including workshops and forums, This networking programme will serve to bring together highly recognised academics who have been working on this topic for many years within the UK with their academic counterparts and key policy stakeholder in the four aforementioned cities. The partners will work collectively to draw together the evidence on the transport and mobility needs of vulnerable populations groups in these countries and to coproduce the methodologies and policy tools that are needed to address their needs in the specific geographical contexts of each case study.

The main contribution of the network activities aim will be to draw lessons from countries in the Global North and South that are already promoting policies to address the transport needs and concerns of low income and vulnerable populations, and to explore their applicability and adaptability for countries with less advanced transport and social policy trajectories.

The network is designed to develop a collaborative group of organisations capable of jointly bidding for future funding proposals in this important area of policy delivery for which there is so with little current capacity to undertake research.

It is designed to have a high degree of scientific and policy impact within the four case study cities (Cape Coast, Dhaka, Lagos and Kampala), as well as within these countries and more widely internationally. Scientifically, it will influence the way in which transport projects are planned and delivered in developing cities by bringing radical and innovative interdisciplinary perspectives to what has been traditionally seen as a solely technical engineering domain (e.g. see Keeler et al, 2016 for the influence of networks on scientific uplift).

From a policy impact perspective, the network seeks to directly influence the way in which city planners and other local stakeholders in these four cities think about the role of transport in promoting the livelihoods and wellbeing of their citizens. This will not only improve the economic success of these cities, as more vulnerable people are able to effectively access jobs, education, health care and welfare services because of the shift in policy that our network seeks to promote , but these outcomes will also contribute to the social welfare of the most vulnerable citizens (particularly women, young people and the elderly and disabled), as they are more able to go about their daily business freed from the threat of road traffic deaths, exposure to unsafe levels of traffic-related pollutants and from fellow passengers and drivers.

These impacts will be achieved in a number of ways, which are guaranteed to achieve a high degree of success because our pathways to impact are integral part of the project's delivery programme:

1. We will directly influence local academic and key decision-makers through their participation in the networking workshop events. We anticipate that approximately 50 people will attend each of the four local workshops (200 in total), with roughly a 50/50 split of academics and non-academic participants. We have an excellent chance of success recruiting these representatives a) via our project Partner SLOCAT, which already has membership of over 90 key organisations across the relevant sectors, e.g. transport, urban planning, environment, health, development; b) via our local University partners who already engage with many of these external organisations as part of their work;

2. We will influence a wider networks of invited academic and non-academics s through the planned programme of interim webinars. We will use out international alumni and other academic networks to recruit these participants, as well as our and policy contacts working on transport inclusion in the Multilateral Development Banks, OECD, DFID, etc. We anticipate the participation of approximately 200 additional individuals via this medium.

3. We will produce 6-8 written reports, policy briefings and other supplementary materials as an output from the networking events. These will be made available on the project website and advertised to an international audience via the social media. We carefully monitor the download records of these materials and invite recipients to join the interactive sessions.

4. The final report will be directly targeted towards key decision-makers within research funding organisations (e.g. DFID, Volvo Foundation, FIA Foundation, etc.), relevant global organisations (e.g. MDBs, WHO, UN Habitat, etc.) and local national and local government officials of the participating countries. We have excellent access to these organisations through our project partner The SLoCAT Partnership.

5. Over the longer term, we will seek to produce an Open Access Book related to the outputs of the network which is free at the point of delivery so that it is easily accessible to academics in ODA countries.