Reverse Innovation in Urban Mobility

New Incentives for German Cities

Air pollution, noise and a lack of space – German municipalities are looking for ways to make traffic more sustainable. GIZ and the Umweltbundesamt (UBA) have therefore collected inspiring sustainable mobility innovations from emerging and developing countries for the joint brochure “Reverse Innovation – Rethinking Urban Transport Through Global Learning”. In the context of the European Mobility Week on 18 September 2017, Maria Krautzberger (President of the Federal Environment Agency) and Christoph Beier (Vice-Chair of the GIZ Management Board) officially launched the brochure. More than 100 guests from different federal ministries, research facilities and various representatives from the private sector participated in the event.

The new brochure presents 10 innovations from emerging and developing countries that provide inspirations for sustainable mobility in Germany. One example presented at the event was by Ms. Samira Negm from Egypt. She founded Raye7, an urban carpooling app that matches trips of users who belong to predetermined social communities such as co-workers or friends. The payment model is a cashless pointing based system: drivers earn points for every shared ride. Mr. Shengyan Sun, Project manager in the Sustainable Transport GIZ project in Beijing elaborated on the “electric bus boom’ in China. Due to political will, large-scale pilot projects and copious funding programmes, more than 100,000 electric buses are implemented by now. Another innovation was presented by Ms. Dr. Kalpana Viswanath from India, who is Co-Founder of the urban safety app SafetiPin. This mobile application and at the same time an online platform, provides safety information on public places that include a safety scoring of public spaces, a GPS tracking function for users, and a safe route planning option.

The event showed that digital innovations in the urban transport sector are increasingly gaining momentum – “we need to explore new mechanisms to learn from fast developing cities and use this knowledge to identify new urban mobility solutions for German cities” concluded Christoph Beier.

The event was supported by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the project Advancing Transport Climate Strategies and the Sustainable Mobility (Policy Advisory Service).

Want to learn more?

Please download the brochure in English here. A German version of the brochure is available at the website of the UBA.