Just in: Mozambique’s Beira Municipality wins Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge alongside 23 other cities worldwide

Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced the 24 winners of its latest, and largest, Mayors Challenge, a competition to spur local government innovation that improves lives in cities around the world. The sixth Challenge awards municipalities that have proposed and tested the best breakthrough ideas to bolster essential services at scale – including cooling homes, reducing waste, lowering utility costs, expanding transit, increasing jobs, and more. Winning municipalities will each receive $1 million as well as operational support and additional funding for dedicated staff to bring their ideas to life.

From South Bend to Surabaya, Boise to Barcelona, Cape Town to Cartagena, the 24 winners represent 20 countries and over 35 million residents. Selected from more than 630 applications, Bloomberg Philanthropies considered prototypes developed by 50 cities during thefinalist phase, when each pressure-tested core hypotheses with residents. The 24 winning ideas were ultimately chosen for their novelty, potential impact, and strength of implementation plans.

“The most effective city halls are bold, creative, and proactive in solving problems and meeting residents’ needs – and we launched the Mayors Challenge to help more of them succeed,”said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg L.P., and three-term mayor of New York City.“We look forward to supporting this year’s 24 winners as they bring their innovative projects to life – and to seeing their ideas spread to more cities around the world.” The private sector spends more than$800 billion on research and development annuallyin the United States alone, yet no equivalent exists for local governments—wherecapacity is thin, budgets are stretched, and discretionary funds for experimentation are rare.50-75%of municipal spending is dedicated to fixed costs like salaries and debt service, leaving little room to try new things. Meanwhile, city halls’ responsibilities are multiplying.

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More than56% of the world’s populationnow lives in urban areas – a number rising by1.4 million people each weekand expected to represent70% of humanity by 2050. As this trend grows, so too does the importance of, and strain on, the services municipalities provide like clean water, public transportation, safe streets, garbage collection, emergency response, parks and libraries, reliable internet, and more. Yet, as the 50 finalists in the 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challengedemonstrated, with even modest capital and capacity, their officials can deliver outsized results.

Now, the 24 winners will have the resources to execute and expand their programs. Reflecting some of the greatest public service challenges cities face, and the ingenuity that animates local governments across the globe, they include: The 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge was launched by Mike Bloomberg in October 2024 at Bloomberg CityLab in Mexico City. More than 630 cities applied.

InJuly 2025, 200 municipal chiefs from the 50 finalist cities gathered at Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Ideas Camp in Bogotá to hone their concepts with experts and peers. Each finalist city received $50,000 and technical guidance to prototype their ideas locally. This enabled officials to gain valuable resident feedback, build public support for projects, and fine-tune their proposals based on what worked.

As part of the ongoing Mayors Challenge program, winners will continue to use these innovation practices to implement their Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported interventions. “The most effective governments today are not just adding programs — they are rebuilding the machinery of government itself,”said Admiral Michael G. Mullen, President & CEO of MGM Consulting and 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge advisory committee member.“The 24 winning city halls of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge show what that looks like in practice with systems that anticipate problems before they spike, purchasing power that shapes markets in the public interest, and services that place residents—their needs and their ideas—at the center of delivery.

They prove that state capacity is not inherited – it is built – and offer a blueprint for how.” The 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge builds on more than 10 years of work led by Bloomberg Philanthropies to discover, nurture, and drive innovation in cities. The awards across five previous rounds of competition have provided 38 winning municipalities with funding and technical assistance to realize their ideas for addressing civic issues. “As a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, Ghent will have the space and support to tackle one of the most unfair realities in public service: when residents qualify for help but never receive it,”said Mayor Mathias De Clercq of Ghent, Belgium.“We will redesign how our city supports residents around real-life events, like the birth of a child, by connecting government data, coordinating teams, and new technology. This will allow eligible families, including the up to 70% who miss out today, to receive the benefits they are entitled to proactively and reliably, and never by chance.”

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