Two Philippine cities — Manila and Butuan —  have been selected to the top 50 cities among over 600 cities worldwide by the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 2021 Mayors Challenge.  Manila and Butuan were among the eight cities in Asia-Pacific which made it to the global 50 and the only two cities in Southeast Asia. As a Mayors Challenge finalists, Manila and Butuan now advance to the four-month Champion Phase of the competition. From June through October, the 50 finalist cities will refine their ideas with technical assistance from Bloomberg Philanthropies and its network of leading innovation experts. Fifteen of the 50 cities will ultimately win the grand prize, with each receiving $1 million and robust multi-year technical assistance to implement, scale their ideas and make these projects a reality. Grand prize winners will be announced in early 2022. The 50 Champion Cities submitted ideas addressing four of the most significant challenges borne of the pandemic: economic recovery and inclusive growth; health and wellbeing; climate and environment; and good governance and equality. The Bloomberg Mayors Challenge is a worldwide competition that aims to spur innovative ideas for the improvement of cities and their inhabitants. It encourages leaders “to think outside the box about how to confront their most difficult challenges.” In the case of Manila, its challenge is the lack of reliable data. Thus, when Manila Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso assumed office as Manila’s 27th Mayor in July 2019, the young mayor who hailed from the slums of Manila, embarked on a comprehensive data infrastructure to influence better governance, policymaking and economic opportunity in the city. The solution is packaged under “Go Manila,” a multi-dimensional, transformative initiative of new policies, processes, investments in digital technologies and platforms, designed to build the first modern data infrastructure in Manila’s 450-year history. “Go Manila” will upskill the city government and uplift Manila residents – particularly its poor – in a city-wide program of digital education, engagement, analytics and opportunity while improving policies and programs for good governance. “Go Manila” will be the first city-wide, digital data infrastructure for any Philippine city, impacting 327,395 to 664,347 poor and at-risk persons individually, the ecosystem delivers life improvements for all 1.8 million Manila residents. It will be scalable and transferrable to cities across the Philippines and around the world. “Through innovation – leveraging the best digital technologies, collecting and analyzing data no Philippine city has done before – ‘Go Manila’ transforms not only how we govern and manage our capital city – but creates meaningful and positive 21st century impacts for every Manileño. This is our challenge: To win our future and rejoin the roster of the world’s greatest cities,” said Domagoso, a former movie actor. For Butuan, the lesser known city in Northern Mindanao but is fast developing into a highly-urbanized city, it proposes to create a catalytic mechanism along the agribusiness value chain ecosystem that will provide demand forecasts and create price prediction models linked to farmers’ planning of production. Bloomberg considered Butuan’s idea on agriculture and marketing as compelling because of the “ambitious goals the city believes it could achieve in the short term through this initiative, including but not limited to: Increasing vegetable production from 19 percent of need in 2020 to 150 percent by 2023, increasing farmers’ income by 50 percent and reducing the average vegetable retail price by 50 percent.” “Butuan faces high rates of hunger and food insecurity, in part because of its struggles around local food production. The city will fine-tune an ineffective agricultural market by giving farmers predictive data to make better decisions about the type and amount of crops to plant, and fix some commodity prices to reduce risk on vegetables and high-demand foods,” Bloomberg said. Mayor Ronnie Vicente C. Lagnada said the city government “looks forward to joining and learning from this global community of innovative cities as we work to improve upon our idea in the months ahead.”