How Swiss cities are stepping up as foreign aid budgets shrink

Since a programme financed by the city of Zurich began in 2023, workers going door-to-door in Santa Cruz neighbourhoods have recovered over 1,360 tonnes of waste. Pablo Rossendy/Swisscontact

Local governments in Europe are defying state cuts to development assistance and helping cities in lower-income regions tackle common challenges like climate change. Such efforts are mutually beneficial, cities like Zurich insist.

Every day, the Nuevo Abasto wholesale market in Bolivia’s biggest city delivers up to 13,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables to merchants, restaurants and families – and leaves the municipality dealing with 20 tonnes of organic waste.

The market is a vital resource for the people of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the Americas. It’s also an example of how cities across the world can learn from each other’s experiences in coping with common problems.

The Swiss city of Zurich has provided the Nuevo Abasto market with funds and expertise to set up giant compost bins that produce fertiliser from rotting vegetables. It’s also assisting with Santa Cruz’s plans to create a system for collecting organic waste across the city.

Switzerland’s largest municipality is among a growing number of local and regional authorities in rich countries that are defying their national governments’ cuts to foreign aid and directly maintaining or expanding development programmes of their own.

Together, their contribution to international assistance jumped nearly 40% after 2015, reaching $2.8 billion (CHF2.8 billion) in 2021 across 11 donor nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) latest available dataExternal link.

It’s not just money. Rich cities’ experiences in dealing with problems of growth mean they can be uniquely placed to aid sustainable development, especially in urban communities of the world’s low- and middle-income regions.

“Cities are laboratories for innovation – we are simply forced to find concrete solutions for the people,” said Christina Wandeler, head of international relations at the City of Zurich. “That’s why we have to be a part of the international cooperation system.”

Switzerland, along with France, Belgium and Spain, has among the highest concentration of urban centres involved in development work, according to a 2024 reportExternal link mapping these so-called donor cities. That year, Swiss cantons and municipalities contributed CHF74 million to Switzerland’s development assistance budget of CHF3 billion.

A world that’s increasingly urban

It’s no coincidence that donor cities are focusing their attention on local issues abroad. Cities are economic engines that produce more than 70% of the world’s carbon emissions and half of its waste. As a result, they are on the frontlinesExternal link of challenges like climate change and finding ways to tackle them.

Today over four billion people live in urban areas, a figure that’s set to External linkrise by another 2.5 billion by 2050. Most of this growth is taking place in Asia and Africa, where rapidly expanding metropolises face enormous pressures.

“They can’t keep up with demand for housing, infrastructure, and public services,” said Brigitte Hoermann, who leads the Asia hub at Brussels-based Cities Alliance, which fights urban poverty. “And you have a huge youthful labour force that needs to find employment.”

In 2019, the people of Zurich said they were prepared to help: 70% of citizens approvedExternal link spending between 0.3% and 1% of Zurich’s tax income on development assistance. This year’s international cooperation budget totals CHF12 million, a figure that’s grown steadily since the vote, said Wandeler.

In all, around 200 municipalities in the Alpine country are active in development cooperation, according to the 2024 donor city report. They range from the town of Anières in western Switzerland, with a population of 2,500, to the city of Geneva.

Both are among municipalities that have committed to an international target of spending 0.7% of their budget on development assistance. As for total money spent, “larger cities like Zurich and Geneva lead the way with substantial resources and formal cooperation frameworks”, the report says.

That contrasts with the shrinking national budget for foreign assistance, with over CHF400 million due to be cut by 2028, despite polling that shows public support for aid. This month, the Swiss government announced plans to allocate a greater share of that budget to humanitarian aid and end all development cooperation activities in Latin America.

In the wake of these announcements, Wandeler said her city will continue supporting projects in all lower-income countries. Zurich’s waste-management partnership with Santa Cruz, which is managed by NGO Swisscontact, also includes Santiago de Cali in Colombia.

Across Europe, other cities are defying national government cuts. A 2025 surveyExternal link of local governments in 11 countries by the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) showed most planned to either maintain or boost their development budgets.

Some countries, such as Germany, offer platforms that help their cities cooperate with counterparts in target regions abroad.

In Spain, public calls for greater participation in development at all levels of government began building as far back as the 1990s, said Ivana Skazlic, a research analyst at the CEMR. By 2022, Spanish cities and regions were spending $436 million on international cooperation, with 15 municipalities in the Catalan region now hitting the 0.7% target.

City partnerships with mutual benefits

Cities, though, can’t provide anything like as much cash as national governments.

And while any funding is welcome, there has been a shift in recent years away from just sending funds to developing regions, with both sides now exchanging ideas based on their experiences, according to Skazlic.

The city of Cali wants to recover a greater proportion of the nearly 2,000 tonnes of solid waste it produces each day and send this on for reuse, recycling or composting. Pablo Rossendy/Swisscontact

“Cities today face many of the same challenges, regardless of geography,” said Alejandro Eder, the mayor of Santiago de Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city. “That’s why city-city cooperation is so valuable – we don’t believe every city needs to reinvent solutions from scratch.”

Cali, he added, is keen to learn from Zurich and share its own practices: “These partnerships create value in both directions.”

Wandeler agrees, pointing to Santa Cruz’s use of WhatsApp and door-to-door visits to raise awareness about waste disposal. Zurich puts this information on its website and mobile app, distributes flyers and posters, and clearly labels waste disposal infrastructure to inform its citizens.

“It raises the question: how do you reach people who don’t read our flyers, never go to our website, and are throwing plastic bags in the organic waste container?” said Wandeler. “Of course, it’s not about lifting a practice directly from Santa Cruz, but about opening the mind – that maybe there are other possibilities we should consider.”

Cali wants to find out how separating and disposing of waste responsibly has “become part of everyday life in Zurich [pictured],” said Mayor Alejandro Eder. ERZ

Local conditions are also an important consideration. Zurich’s waste disposal and recycling service ERZ, for instance, serves a population of just over 450,000, far smaller than in Cali or Santa Cruz. And, contrary to Zurich, informal rubbish pickers make up a significant portion of the waste workforce in Santa Cruz, so they are an integral part of the partnership, said Wandeler.

Cities want a seat at the multilateral table

Hoermann of Cities Alliance said one way to deal with tight resources is by focusing on small- and medium-sized secondary cities, which sometimes lag capital cities in soliciting resources from the state and international donors. They tend to have small budgets where a little bit of money and technical expertise can have a big impact, said the Bangkok-based expert.

She believes cities in rich countries can leverage not just cash but also their voice, especially on the global stage. At multilateral meetings on issues such as climate financing that directly affect them, cities are increasingly fighting to get more seats at the table, said Hoermann.

“It will be the cities of the [Global] North leading this struggle,” she said, suggesting they can use their international standing and lobby for a voice for all local governments.

Cities can also bring important perspectives and experiences, according to Bettina Etter, a foreign affairs project manager at the City of Zurich.

“Because we have solutions that can be replicated, we’re able to address the bigger issues,” she said. “That’s why it’s important for cities to be part of the discussion at the global policy level.”

The ongoing rollback of development assistance by national governments may even be the moment for cities to speak up, Etter added. “We can use it as an opportunity to step up more, in the sense of being recognised for what cities are already doing. It’s really not just about money.”

Edited by Tony Barrett/vm/sb