During the 25^th Governing Council of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) held in Nairobi, Kenya from 17 and 23 April 2015, several side events and bilateral meetings were organised by UN-Habitat partners and member States. The Minister of Infrastructure, Hon. James Musoni, delivered a speech on Rwanda experience for achieving sustainable urban development. He reiterated the importance of developing National Urbanisation Policy and to putting in place a functional high level policy support instrument such as the Rwanda National Steering Committee on Human Settlements (NSCHS). This high level coordination body, as it derived from his message to the audience, is very useful to oversee the integrated planning and joint development of urban –rural linkages across the continuum of human settlements. In conclusion, he highlighted the importance of designing homegrown solutions to satisfy people needs in post-2015 Development Agenda.

Later after his speech, Hon. James Musoni and Hon. Mohammed Nabil Ben Abdallah, Minister of Housing and City Policy of the Kingdom of Morocco signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to start a South-South cooperation to advance sustainable urban development in both countries. This ceremony was facilitated by UN-Habitat Executive Director. As captured in the road map for implementing the MoU, the two parties agreed to organize a high level technical study visit to Morocco by July 2015, to adopt an agreement of cooperation to ease the execution of activities, to develop frameworks to facilitate private sector involvement and collaboration with training institutions.

The highlight of the participation of the Rwanda delegation at the Governing Council was the high level meeting with the Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Dr. Joan Clos. The main point discussed as the status of the current and future collaboration of the Government of Rwanda with UN-Habitat. Representatives of both institutions agree to complete the development of the second phase of the Programme Achieving Sustainable Urban Development with a focus on urban economy and municipal finance as a mean to increase local revenue to advance medium and long term development of districts.