From 29 November till 3 December 2015 the United Cities and Local Government of Africa (UCLGA) organised its Africities summit in Johannesburg. VNG International and CMRA participated in this summit with a session on benchmarking. Local government representatives from Benin, Ghana and South Africa, together with representatives of VNG International and CMRA showcased their experiences with benchmarking. They highlighted the successes they had achieved through benchmarking and how knowledge was shared and distributed among other municipalities.

There was a high attendance of local government officials and politicians from different countries throughout the continent. In the session, there was a good balance between information on the methodology of benchmarking on the one hand, and concrete experiences from municipal representatives of the three countries on the other hand.

The feedback from the audience was very positive; the interest for the concept of benchmarking was high and there will be further contact with people who wanted to have more details on it.