

This story was first published in Spanish on our sister site, CityLab Latino.


But a new initiative proposed by city government could lend these struggling farmers a hand. As part of this year’s Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, the Brazilian megacity drafted a proposal for a digital interchange platform designed to connect vendors with restaurants, markets, and other retailers in an effort to make it easier for them to sell their wares. On Wednesday, São Paulo’s proposal was named the winner of the third ever Mayors Challenge, which gives it a $5 million cash prize to implement the idea.

São Paulo took the grand prize out of a field of 900 original participants from throughout Latin America. But it won’t be the only one to take home a cash prize: Four other cities will also receive $1 million each to implement their respective proposals. The winners include two Colombian cities, Medellín and Bogotá, as well as Santiago, Chile, and Guadalajara, Mexico.

The Colombian capital of Bogotá proposed a project meant to improve children’s transportation to and from school. That daily commute can take more than an hour for many children, mainly because of nightmarish traffic. The idea is to create separate lanes just for school buses during school-commute hours, and implement learning activities children can partake in during the travel time. In Medellín, an initiative called Bancuadra will attempt to curb illegal funding in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where citizens lack access to the formal banking system and often have no choice but to resort to shady lending operations linked to organized crime. Bancuadra pools neighbors’ financial resources together to create a sort of small bank within neighborhoods, providing access to loans and other services that could help steer people away from illegal lending operations.

Santiago also won a prize for its proposal aimed at reducing obesity in a country where 64 percent of Chileans over 15 years old are overweight or obese, according to Bloomberg. The project, “Juntos Santiago” (Together Santiago), functions as a competition between neighborhoods to reduce childhood obesity. Each neighborhood group earns points for its efforts and improvements, which can then be converted to cash for neighborhood improvement projects such as new parks.


This year’s Mayors Challenge follows two previous competitions in 2013 and 2014, the first in the U.S. and the second in Europe. The previous grand prize winners in those regions were Providence, Rhode Island, and Barcelona, Spain. Check out a full list of previous winners and their proposals here.

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