Empowered Residents | Smarter City | Better Future

Build a city Where All residents Are Safe, Strong & Valued

Who We Are

Bulawayo Progressive Residents’ Association is a civil society membership based organisation that seeks to bridge the gap between the city’s duty bearers and residents. We also seeks to promote effective residents and stakeholder participation in local, democratic, and accountable governance. BPRA adopted a down-top approach in local governance where residents are the ones who communicate issues that affect them in wards, as there are the ones who are bare the day to day service delivery issues.

BPRA has seen significant achievements throughout the years through empowering and promoting active participation from the city residents. This has seen the birth and rise of community leaders, councillors and members of parliament around the city in the recent years. Over the years, BPRA has also worked with residents to foster unfavourable policy changes such the as the 2019 Assert Declaration Policy that BPRA crafted and was adopted by councillors. We have also led residents in advocacy issues such as the declaration of Bulawayo as a water crisis in Zimbabwe, in a time where there was no water in the city.

Handle @byopra

What We Do

01.

Advocacy

Local and National Advocacy on key local government issues such as policy advocacy, public advocacy, public awareness campaigns and petitions

02.

Capacity Building

We conduct capacity building initiatives including trainings, coaching, and other capacity enhancing processes with its members, leaders, and other local government stakeholders.

03.

We Strengthen

incubated and assisted in the development of other Residents Associations in various parts of the country, including Gweru, Plumtree, Gwanda, Beitbridge, Lupane and Hwange.

04.

Social Accountability

This is one of our

key work pillars, and has seen the organisation conduct various activities in the local government public expenditure management cycle. This includes among others residents-local authority engagement meetings, local authority and national budget tracking and analysis, as well as residents and public officials training workshops on various elements of social accountability.

05.

Research and Policy Analysis

We have employed this work stream to support the other 4 work streams namely: ensuring that advocacy is evidence based, capacity building is informed by needs assessments, while incubation is informed by both best practice and BPRA’s experience, and that social accountability is informed by credible information base.

OUR ACHIEVEMENTS

Policy Development

In June 2019, a Policy on Asset Declaration developed by BPRA was adopted by Councillors and Senior Management.

Unearthing Corruption

in 2019 managed to unearth corruption in the Bulawayo City Council after four (4) Councillors were allegedly given unmerited favours by a company bidding for the City Parking Tender