Bloomberg Philanthropies has announced a $31 million investment in the Partnership for Healthy Cities and the addition of six cities to the initiative to create safer and healthier urban environments: Bucharest, Romania; Cairo, Egypt; Córdoba, Argentina; Dublin, Ireland; Greater Manchester, United Kingdom; and Warsaw, Poland.

Launched in 2017 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the World Health Organization, and Vital Strategies, the initiative provides municipal governments around the world with financial assistance to implement one of fourteen health interventions to address tobacco control, road safety, safe and active mobility, healthy food, data surveillance, or overdose prevention. Municipal staff are provided with technical assistance, communications support, grants of up to $100,000, workshops, and access to in-person and virtual peer-to-peer exchanges that support collaboration and sharing of lessons learned. The latest announcement brings Bloomberg Philanthropies' total investment in the partnership to $52 million, with seventy cities participating.

With support from the partnership, the Cairo Governate will work to make healthier food options available for people eating in city restaurants; the Dublin City Council will expand a pedestrian access and safety audit with the goal of transforming the street and sidewalks to be more pedestrian-friendly; and the City of Córdoba will focus initially on COVID-19 vaccine outreach to older adults who have difficulty reading and writing or are hesitant about being vaccinated. Bucharest, Greater Manchester, and Warsaw will announce their health or safety projects soon.

"Cities have long served as drivers of public health, a distinction which holds even more importance as urban areas stand to absorb up to 68 percent of the world's population by 2050," said Vital Strategies president and CEO José Luis Castro. "Although the heavy toll of [non-communicable diseases] and injuries remains a challenge, we celebrate the remarkable progress made by cities in the Partnership....During the current pandemic, the partnership pivoted to provide resources to network cities for their COVID-19 responses. This included a webinar series, led by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, that connected mayors worldwide and provided them with access to the latest COVID-19 information and the perspectives of leading experts, and an online response center with more than four hundred resources and tools. Fifty-two cities in the network benefited from additional grant funding to address their COVID-19 response and vaccination needs — including outreach on how to best educate high-risk populations on the importance of the vaccine."