Liveable Cities Challenge Philippines congratulates Butuan City for making it to the top 15 grand prize winners for this year’s Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge - becoming the only  Southeast Asian city to earn a spot in the global 15. 

As winners of this year’s competition, $1M will be awarded to each city and additional technical support from Bloomberg to implement and replicate their ideas for the next three years. Among the top 15 that Bloomberg announced as winners of the Global Mayors Challenge are Amman (Jordan), Bogotá (Colombia), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Hermosillo (Mexico),  Istanbul (Turkey), Kigali (Rwanda), Kumasi (Ghana), Paterson (USA), Phoenix (USA), Rochester (USA), Rotterdam (Netherlands), Rourkela (India), Vilnius (Lithuania), Wellington (New Zealand), and Butuan (Philippines). 

Last year, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the launch of a global innovation competition for city leaders to pitch their innovative ideas in response to COVID-19 and their city's most pressing problems. Out of 631 applications worldwide, 50 Champion Cities were listed as finalists to advance to the final phase of the competition to refine and improve their proposals from June to October 2021. Butuan and the City of Manila were both selected to the Top 50.   

Throughout the challenge, mayors have willingly stepped up and provided long-term and innovative solutions to improve the lives of their own residents across four significant categories: Economic Recovery & Inclusive Growth; Health & Wellbeing; Climate & Environment; and Good Governance & Equality. In the case of Butuan, the city decided to focus on Health and Wellbeing through its agricultural business model, AgriBoost. 

To prevent a possible food and nutrition crisis in the future, Butuan City Mayor Ronnie Vicente Lagnada’s AgriBoost initiative presented a digital and data-driven approach in transforming the city’s agricultural ecosystem "for a sustainable, food secure, and vibrant community." AgriBoost’s four-pronged strategy aims to enhance farmers' capacities and competitiveness, enable agri-value chain players to plan and make effective decisions through predictive data analytics, control the commodity prices of their food production, and connect farmers to businesses with fresh, locally grown food. Butuan’s innovative agri-business model ensures the city’s adequate supply of affordable and nutritious food for its citizens while improving its agricultural value chain system for its farmers and constituents. To know more about AgriBoost, please visit agriboost.ph. 

Liveable Cities Challenge Philippines worked with Bloomberg Philanthropies to invite cities and municipalities nationwide to participate in the 2021 Global Mayors Challenge. 

Congratulations to Butuan City and to all winners of the 2021 Mayors Challenge.