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ESA Regional Hub: Regional Workshop on the Role of Border Municipalities in Addressing Hate, Extremism, Trafficking and Other Threats to Safety and Security

Publication Date:

12/06/2025

Content Type:

Event Reports

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Border MunicipalitiesESA Regional HubMigrationPublic ServicesSTRIVE CitiesYouth Unemployment

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This report provides a summary of discussions during the event and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Strong Cities Network Management Unit, Strong Cities members, event sponsors or participants.

Event Details

Description: A regional workshop that convened over 50 municipal officials from border towns, representatives of national governments and civil society organisations, as well as regional and other multilateral organisations to discuss the role of border municipalities in addressing hate, extremism, trafficking and other threats to safety and security.

Where & When: 11–12 June 2025, Dar es Salaam (Tanzania)

Cities Represented

• Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • City of Bukavu
  • City of Uvira
• Kenya
  • Busia County
  • Mandera County
  • Mombasa County
  • Taita Taveta County
  • Trans Nzoia County
  • Wajir Municipality
  • West Pokot County
• Malawi
  • City of Blantyre
• Mozambique
  • City of Maputo
  • Villa Gorongosa
• South Africa
  • City of Cape Town
  • Musina Municipality
  • Stellenbosch Municipality
• Tanzania
  • Kakonko District
  • Mginga District
  • Zanzibar Urban Municipality
• Uganda
  • Kasese District
  • Koboko Municipality
  • Kyengera Town
  • Masaka City
  • Nansana Municipality

Partners Represented

Local Government / Local Authority Associations

• Alliance of Mayors’ Initiative for Community Action at the Local Level (AMICAALL Uganda)
• Association of Local Authorities of Tanzania
• East African Community and Local Governments Association
• South African Local Government Association

National Governments

• Ministry of East African Community Affairs (Uganda)
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs and East African Cooperation (Tanzania)
• National Counter Terrorism Centre (Kenya)

Other Partners

• African Union Border Programme
• East African Community (EAC)
• East African Law Society
• GIZ
• Southern African Development Community (SADC)
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
• Uganda Cross Border Traders Cooperative Union
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
• WeWorld

Key Takeaways

For Mayors & Cities

• Engage counterparts across the border to jointly develop and deploy social and cultural activities that can create positive interaction between your residents and thus mitigate stigma and/or conflict.
• Tap into the community (for example, through community policing models) to strengthen early warning, prevention of, and response to, inter-community tensions and other threats to social cohesion.
• Partner with young people to address youth idleness, while also leveraging their social media savviness to spread positive messaging and raise awareness about public service delivery, employment and other opportunities for youth.
• Leverage sports, arts and cultural activities to foster interaction between residents and support integration, particularly of migrants, refugees and other historically marginalised communities.
• Invest in community-wide digital resilience training, partnering with community-based organisations and schools to disseminate basic digital hygiene and safety skills.

For National Governments

• Ensure border towns are included in nationally-led cross-border security initiatives and dialogues.
• Recognise and formalise a role for border towns in national security strategies and frameworks more broadly.
• Facilitate direct engagement between regional blocs, such as EAC and SADC, and local government to support local implementation of relevant regional strategies and frameworks.

For Partners and Donors

• Like national governments, local government associations should advocate for greater direct engagement and interaction between local governments and regional blocs and partners.
• International partners such as the African Union and UNDP should make sure their border-related programming consults with and considers a role for border municipalities.

Next Steps

The workshop concluded with breakout groups focused on some of the most promising and relevant practices shared at the workshop, with each group identifying next steps and priorities. These included:

• Group 1 – Neighbourhood Watch: Nansana Municipality committed to hosting other cities for benchmarking exercises, including Masaka and Nebbi, while peer learning between Nansana and Stellenbosch will continue as the former seeks to scale Neighbourhood Watch even further.

• Group 2 – Talking Compounds: Busia, Taita Taveta, and Wajir Counties in Kenya all expressed interest in implementing a version of Kyengera Town’s Talking Compounds model.

• Group 3 – Migration Management: Koboko Municipality (Uganda), which has a robust and inclusive approach to managing migration, invited counterparts from across the region to come see its integration efforts in practice. SALGA and Musina Municipality (South Africa) committed to taking Koboko up on this offer and to conduct a site visit in Autumn 2025. SALGA committed to sharing migration management learnings with local governments across South Africa, where xenophobia and anti-migrant violence are increasingly a problem.

• Group 4 – Coastal Partnerships: Cape Town, Mombasa (Kenya), and Zanzibar (Tanzania) seek to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on maintaining safety, security and social cohesion as popular, rapidly growing coastal cities. The MoU would commit each city to investing in peer-learning on youth and women’s empowerment, community policing, social media for good, environmental conservation and more.

• Group 5 – Other Practices: Bukavu (Democratic Republic of the Congo) seeks to learn more from Blantyre on how it addresses broader governance challenges as it grapples with rapid urbanisation, while Blantyre would like to learn from Bukavu on how it manages crime, noting that despite being in an active conflict zone, Bukavu does not have much crime. Meanwhile, Villa Gorongosa would like to formally twin with Blantyre on maintaining social cohesion in the context of elections. 

Additionally, organisations such as EAC and SADC identified next steps based on the workshop’s discussions:

• SADC noted that it would like to work with SALGA, other Southern African local government associations and Strong Cities, to make its threat monitoring data “useful and actionable” for local governments and “to build a common framework focused on combating extremism and terrorism”.
• The EAC seeks to include local governments in its various technical working groups and proposed to reinstate EACLGA (which hosts Strong Cities’ ESA Regional Hub) as an observer to ensure EAC strategies and frameworks take into account the perspectives of, and, more broadly engagel, local government.

Finally, with the appetite for peer learning and city-focused capacity-building only growing across ESA, Strong Cities will continue its efforts to mobilise resources to sustain its portfolio in the region beyond the conclusion of the three-year STRIVE Cities project, and to advocate for a role for local government in national and regional safety and security initiatives. Strong Cities will also explore virtual modes of engagement to enable more regular and consistent exchange between members of its Border Municipalities Working Group.

Additional Resources

• ESA Event Report: How Local Governments Can Prevent Hate, Extremism and Polarisation and Promote Unity and Social Cohesion in Malawi. Strong Cities Network, March 2024.
• ESA City Spotlights: eThekwini Municipality (South Africa), Mandera County (Kenya) Mukaza Commune (Burundi), Nansana Municipality (Uganda), Stellenbosch Municipality (South Africa) 
• Strong Cities Policy Brief: National-Local Cooperation: A Pillar of City-Led Prevention of Hate, Extremism and Polarisation – A Practice Update. Strong Cities Network, December 2024.
• Global Counterterrorism Forum’s National-Local Cooperation Toolkit, September 2023 
• A Guide for City-Led Response. Strong Cities Network, April 2024 
• Preventing and Responding to Election Disruption and Violence: Ten Considerations for Cities, Strong Cities Network, March 2024 
• A Guide for Mayors: Preventing and Responding to Hate, Extremism and Polarisation, Strong Cities Network, September 2023 
• A Guide for Cities: Preventing Hate, Extremism and Polarisation, Strong Cities Network, September 2023 
• Addressing the Overlooked Role of African Cities in Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, Strong Cities Network, July 2022 

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