Global Citizenship Report 2017

In addition, through our Export and Agency Finance division, Citi partners with development finance institutions (DFIs) to create financing solutions for development projects. DFIs are government agencies that support overseas investment in emerging markets and are one tool to generate economic development in underserved areas. By partnering with DFIs such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and the Asian Development Bank, Citi structures investments that share risk and enable important development projects that would normally be considered too risky for the private sector. Philanthropic Efforts Around the world, NGOs make valuable contributions to addressing difficult social problems. But they often need funding and other resources to amplify the impact of their work or to pursue as-yet-unproven solutions that can be tested and later brought to scale. This is often the space where Citi and the Citi Foundation can play an effective role. Moreover, by helping city leaders develop technology-driven solutions to urban challenges, our initiatives help support SDG 9 , which promotes inclusive and sustainable industrialization and fosters innovation . Since 2014, the City Accelerator, an initiative of the Citi Foundation and Living Cities, has gathered municipal leaders from cities of all sizes to share learnings and try new approaches for sustainable and equitable urban growth. In 2017, five cities — Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis and Milwaukee — worked together to refine their approach to procurement spending, pursuing at least one new strategy to increase the diversity of municipal vendors and contrac- tors and direct more spending to local minority-owned businesses. For example, the city of Chicago, which has been working on the issue of inclusive spending since 2015 through its Procurement Reform Task Force, will focus on building a universal procurement platform to cover multiple city agencies that spend a combined $6 billion every year. This effort directly contributes to SDG 9 , target 9.3 , which seeks to increase the access of small-scale industrial and other enterprises, in particular in developing countries, to financial services, including affordable credit, and their integration into value chains and markets. SERVICE DESIGN FOR AND WITH LOW-INCOME NEW YORKERS Few know more about the strengths and weaknesses of public services than those who rely on them. One emerging field of practice, known as service design, works to actively engage all stakeholders of a service — especially beneficiaries — to better understand every aspect of how a public service is administered to improve its delivery and impact. In October 2017, the New York City Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, and Citi Community Development launched the nation’s first-ever municipal Service Design Studio and toolkit dedicated to making public services for low-income New Yorkers as effective and accessible as possible. The Studio launch builds on several years of work with the city of New York to explore the use of service design to improve services that meet the needs of its most vulnerable residents, from free tax preparation to financial coaching, through the Designing for Financial Empowerment initiative. The Service Design Studio at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and its accompanying toolkit, NYC Civic Service Design Tools + Tactics, provide a central resource for expertise and best practices in service design to support public servants in the city of New York. The service design approach incorporates ethnographic field research, behavioral science, econom- ics, information technology, design and other related disciplines. The Service Design Studio will be available to all New York City government agencies, providing a valuable resource to test and scale innovative public service improvements for low-income New Yorkers. SDG SPOTLIGHT: GOAL 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure 92