24 city halls from 20 countries will receive $1 million as well as operational support and additional funding for dedicated staff to scale tested innovations to improve essential services
Winning projects include repairing infrastructure to unlock housing, using AI to connect families to health care, building early warning systems to mitigate weather emergencies, turning waste into school meals, and more
New York, NY – Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced the 24 winners of its latest, and largest, Mayors Challenge, a competition to spur local government innovation that improves lives in cities around the world. The sixth Challenge awards municipalities that have proposed and tested the best breakthrough ideas to bolster essential services at scale – including cooling homes, reducing waste, lowering utility costs, expanding transit, increasing jobs, and more. Winning municipalities will each receive $1 million as well as operational support and additional funding for dedicated staff to bring their ideas to life.
From South Bend to Surabaya, Boise to Barcelona, Cape Town to Cartagena, the 24 winners represent 20 countries and over 35 million residents. Selected from more than 630 applications, Bloomberg Philanthropies considered prototypes developed by 50 cities during the finalist phase, when each pressure-tested core hypotheses with residents. The 24 winning ideas were ultimately chosen for their novelty, potential impact, and strength of implementation plans.
“The most effective city halls are bold, creative, and proactive in solving problems and meeting residents’ needs – and we launched the Mayors Challenge to help more of them succeed,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg L.P., and three-term mayor of New York City. “We look forward to supporting this year’s 24 winners as they bring their innovative projects to life – and to seeing their ideas spread to more cities around the world.”
The private sector spends more than $800 billion on research and development annually in the United States alone, yet no equivalent exists for local governments—where capacity is thin, budgets are stretched, and discretionary funds for experimentation are rare. 50-75% of municipal spending is dedicated to fixed costs like salaries and debt service, leaving little room to try new things.
Meanwhile, city halls’ responsibilities are multiplying. More than 56% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas – a number rising by 1.4 million people each week and expected to represent 70% of humanity by 2050. As this trend grows, so too does the importance of, and strain on, the services municipalities provide like clean water, public transportation, safe streets, garbage collection, emergency response, parks and libraries, reliable internet, and more.
Yet, as the 50 finalists in the 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge demonstrated, with even modest capital and capacity, their officials can deliver outsized results. Now, the 24 winners will have the resources to execute and expand their programs. Reflecting some of the greatest public service challenges cities face, and the ingenuity that animates local governments across the globe, they include:
As-Salt, Jordan: Training unemployed youth in specialized restoration and heritage techniques to create jobs, boost tourism, and preserve the city’s historic architecture.
Barcelona, Spain: Making aging home retrofits more affordable and accessible citywide by providing city-backed financing and removing technical and regulatory barriers—reducing timelines for approval by 40%.
Beira, Mozambique: Relocating hundreds of families of fishermen in high risk, flood-prone coastal areas to insulated, inland neighborhoods—co-designing new infrastructure with impacted residents while preserving livelihoods.
Belfast, United Kingdom: Transforming 126 miles of neglected alleyways into safer, greener, community-owned spaces for tens of thousands of residents.
Benin City, Nigeria: Expanding women’s access to vital health care through neighborhood kiosks, community outreach, and digital referrals.
Boise, United States: Using municipally owned geothermal energy to lower costs and deliver sustainable heating and cooling for multifamily housing—the first effort of its kind led by a U.S. city.
Budapest, Hungary: Turning surplus food into healthy meals for students and seniors through a city-run processing facility, cutting waste and costs while supporting local producers.
Cape Town, South Africa: Co-creating waste collection systems with informal settlement residents to reduce illegal dumping, create jobs, and extend reliable service.
Cartagena, Colombia: Boosting incomes and livelihoods for street-vendors—preserving traditional entrepreneurship in a heritage area—with training and modern carts that enable digital payments and waste management.
Fez, Morocco: Formalizing the work of informal waste picker jobs with stable incomes, upskilling, and better working conditions—improving these residents’ quality of life and recycling and waste management citywide.
Fukuoka, Japan: Improving quality of life for thousands of residents living with dementia through specialist support, coordinated citywide care, and public spaces and businesses designed to support independence.
Ghaziabad, India: Converting cow dung into white rooftop paint that cools homes, lowers emissions, and creates new job opportunities for under-employed women.
Ghent, Belgium: Proactively connecting residents to social benefits and services, reducing stress for vulnerable families during critical life events.
Kanifing, The Gambia: Forming a new youth-led waste collection program that uses small vehicles to reach up to 60% of hard-to-access homes—creating jobs and keeping historically underserved areas clean.
Lafayette, United States: Repairing broken sewer lines at half the cost of new construction—and at no cost to owners—through a new public-private partnership that will develop up to 13,000 new housing units.
Medellín, Colombia: Using AI to make food distribution faster and more efficient to advance the city’s Zero Hunger goal.
Netanya, Israel: Creating mobile play stations in public spaces and parks to bring early childhood supports to in-need families.
Pasig, Philippines: Co-designing with residents floating parks in flood-prone waterways to reduce overflow, add green space, and strengthen community ties.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Pairing AI and municipal outreach to proactively connect in-need residents with early childhood supports such as health care, vaccinations, school enrollment and attendance services, and social benefits.
South Bend, United States: Applying AI to the city’s 311 system to anticipate problems and proactively connect residents with the services they need.
Surabaya, Indonesia: Incentivizing the use of locally made reusable diapers to lower river pollution and improve health outcomes.
Toronto, Canada: Reducing youth hunger by partnering with local producers to provide healthy, culturally relevant meals to every public student daily.
Turku, Finland: Using food aid as an entry point to connect residents—especially immigrants and low-income families—with housing, employment, and financial services.
Visakhapatnam, India: Pioneering solutions with residents to mitigate hazards from floods, cyclones, and heatwaves, and safeguard communities.
Together, the winners’ approaches form a 21st-century governing model emerging inside city halls: action focused on problems other actors—state, national, or private—have left unresolved; systems built to spot risk early and respond before crises occur; teams structured to work across agencies and sectors to achieve outcomes; policy developed in partnership with residents; municipal procurement directed to shape markets—from local food supply to cleaner construction materials—that serve the public good; and digital technology and artificial intelligence used alongside professional judgment to improve everyday experience and results.
The 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge was launched by Mike Bloomberg in October 2024 at Bloomberg CityLab in Mexico City. More than 630 cities applied. In July 2025, 200 municipal chiefs from the 50 finalist cities gathered at Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Ideas Camp in Bogotá to hone their concepts with experts and peers. Each finalist city received $50,000 and technical guidance to prototype their ideas locally. This enabled officials to gain valuable resident feedback, build public support for projects, and fine-tune their proposals based on what worked. As part of the ongoing Mayors Challenge program, winners will continue to use these innovation practices to implement their Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported interventions.
An advisory committee worked alongside Bloomberg Philanthropies to determine finalists and winners. Committee members included Admiral Michael G. Mullen, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony R. Foxx, Professor Lesley Lokko OBE, United Cities and Local Governments Secretary General Emilia Saiz, Lord Norman Foster, and former Administrator of the U.N. Development Programme Achim Steiner.
“The most effective governments today are not just adding programs — they are rebuilding the machinery of government itself,” said Admiral Michael G. Mullen, President & CEO of MGM Consulting and 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge advisory committee member. “The 24 winning city halls of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge show what that looks like in practice with systems that anticipate problems before they spike, purchasing power that shapes markets in the public interest, and services that place residents—their needs and their ideas—at the center of delivery. They prove that state capacity is not inherited – it is built – and offer a blueprint for how.”
The 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge builds on more than 10 years of work led by Bloomberg Philanthropies to discover, nurture, and drive innovation in cities. The awards across five previous rounds of competition have provided 38 winning municipalities with funding and technical assistance to realize their ideas for addressing civic issues. By supporting the replication of the most successful winning ideas—from Providence Talks, an early literacy program that boosts childhood learning, to Visor Urbano, Guadalajara’s pioneering initiative to digitize permitting and reduce corruption—Bloomberg Philanthropies has expanded the impact of the Mayors Challenge to 337 cities globally, reaching over 100 million residents.
“As a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, Ghent will have the space and support to tackle one of the most unfair realities in public service: when residents qualify for help but never receive it,” said Mayor Mathias De Clercq of Ghent, Belgium. “We will redesign how our city supports residents around real-life events, like the birth of a child, by connecting government data, coordinating teams, and new technology. This will allow eligible families, including the up to 70% who miss out today, to receive the benefits they are entitled to proactively and reliably, and never by chance.”
“As food costs continue to rise, one in four visitors to Toronto’s food banks are children,” said Mayor Olivia Chow of Toronto, Canada. “Winning the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge means Toronto will tackle the cost of living and food insecurity crises head on – feeding every public-school student a nutritious meal each day. This is not a pilot program – it is a system-level shift, using the city’s purchasing power to lower costs, support local jobs and farms, and save families nearly $900 a year on groceries. This is about giving every kid what they need to excel—and reshaping the food economy around them.”
“As-Salt’s Mayors Challenge–winning program will turn heritage from an asset we preserve into an asset that provides,” said Mayor Ali Radwan Al-Bataineh of As-Salt, Jordan. “With the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, we are creating vibrant hubs that drive local economic growth, strengthen tourism and enterprise, and equip our youth with skills and jobs—establishing new opportunities for hundreds of unemployed residents—and making preservation an engine for better livelihoods citywide.”
“Boise is proud to be a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, and we look forward to the opportunities that this award will bring to expand a system for our residents that prioritizes affordable, clean heat,” said Mayor Lauren McLean of Boise, Idaho. “This support will provide us with the resources to connect municipally owned geothermal to affordable housing, while creating a model for communities to use as we continue address rising utility costs—and we will be the first city in the nation to do so.”
“As a Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge winner, Beira will work side-by-side with our most at risk coastal communities—fishermen and their families—to preserve their homes, their lives, and their livelihoods before disaster strikes,” said Mayor Albano Carige of Beira, Mozambique. “This is not about creating policy for residents—it is about designing and developing policy with them, ensuring their needs and their hopes are at the heart of the infrastructure—and the future—we collectively build.”
“As a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, Budapest will shift from treating food waste as a disposal problem to a public resource,” said Mayor Gergely Karácsony of Budapest, Hungary. “With the backing of the program, we will purchase two tons of surplus produce every day, keep thousands of tons out of landfills, and shorten supply chains for public kitchens—supporting local farmers while delivering healthier meals to children, seniors, and more residents who need them most.”
To learn more about the 24 winners, visit mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org.
Photos of the 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge finalists, courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies, are available for media use here.
About Bloomberg Philanthropies:
Bloomberg Philanthropies invests in 700 cities and 150 countries around the world to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people. The organization focuses on creating lasting change in five key areas: the Arts, Education, Environment, Government Innovation, and Public Health. Bloomberg Philanthropies encompasses all of Michael R. Bloomberg’s giving, including his foundation, corporate, and personal philanthropy as well as Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consultancy that advises cities around the world. In 2025, Bloomberg Philanthropies distributed $4.3 billion. For more information, please visit bloomberg.org, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, Facebook, and X.
Media Contact:
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