UfM Secretariat to conclude selection of urban projects to be included in the framework of the Urban Project Finance Initiative (UPFI)

Barcelona, 4 February 2014. The UfM Secretariat participated today in the seminar Urban Development in the FEMIP Region, held in Luxembourg on the occasion of the FEMIP Committee meeting. The seminar aims to discuss urban development challenges in the FEMIP region, as well as the Urban Project Finance Initiative (UPFI) and the Medinas 2030 initiative.

The Urban Project Finance Initiative (UPFI) is one of the pillars of the Euro-Mediterranean Sustainable Urban Development Strategy, which was drawn up by the Senior Official Experts and the UfM Secretariat after the first UfM Ministerial Conference on Sustainable Urban Development, held in Strasbourg in November 2011.

The UPFI aims to identify sustainable urban development projects likely to be endorsed by the Union for the Mediterranean and financed and implemented in the short term. As the financial component of the strategy, the UPFI has been developed by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the German KfW Banking Group, under the umbrella of the UfM Secretariat. It receives financial support from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Development and Cooperation, the EIB and the AFD. The first stage of the Initiative concerns the identification of 10 to 15 large-scale urban projects in Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries that will be submitted for UfM labelling. The selection process for the final projects to be included in the framework of the UPFI is currently on-going and will be concluded in coming weeks, while the official UPFI launch is due to take place in the first half of 2014.