The Foreign Affairs team wishes you, dear readers, a happy, healthy and successful 2022! Even though the pandemic will certainly accompany us this year, we are looking forward to diverse and fruitful contacts of the City of Zurich with other cities in Switzerland and in the world.
We look back on an eventful 2021. In April 2021, Christina Wandeler took over as the new head of the Foreign Affairs team and we were able to welcome several new team members. This expansion is directly connected with the allocation of a new area of responsibility. As of January 2021, the transfer of the international cooperation in the context of develeopment cooperation (IZA) from the Finance Department to Foreign Affairs team was successfully completed. In the course of this transfer, the international cooperation of the City of Zurich was further developed and the system for project contributions was adapted. In addition to the previous project contributions to Swiss NGOs, temporary city cooperations in the development context are now planned, among other things. Through knowledge transfer, the sustainable development of cities will be supported in accordance with the goals of the UN Agenda 2030 (especially Goal 11). With Freetown (Sierra Leone), Mbeya (Tanzania), Cox's Bazar (Bangladesh) and Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) such city cooperations are in the process of being established. Also taken over by the Finance Department as of January 2021 is the responsibility for city's contributions to humanitarian aid abroad. Within this framework, contributions to emergency aid projects in Afghanistan, Haiti and Bosnia and Herzegovina could be made in 2021. The Foreign Affairs team was also active in its previous areas of work. For example, the temporary cooperation with Graz on the topic of «safe cycling» was successfully implemented together with the mobility departments of the city as part of a working visit by a Zurich delegation to Austria. The planned festival «Zurich meets Berlin» was affected by the consequences of the pandemic and will now take place this year.
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