Ronald McGill is the Project Lead for the EU funded Greening of Uganda’s Urbanisation and Industrialisation project; a three-year initiative worth US$5.5m. His drive is to see the project implemented in four pilot secondary cities and four industrial locations across the country. The project includes a solid waste management outcome and the integration of green development into the third National Development Plan (NDPIII).

He was previously Team Leader to the Kenya Municipal Programme, a US$124m initiative with a strong infrastructure dimension. Other team leader roles were in Tanzania (local government reform) and Ethiopia (performance budgeting). He started his international career as the Town Clerk and Chief Executive of Lilongwe City Council in Malawi’s capital. He was invited to return as Urban Management Adviser to the parent Ministry of Local Government, to replicate the achievements in Lilongwe, in Blantyre, Zomba and Mzuzu.

He spent eight years with UNCDF in New York, as a Senior Technical Adviser, advising on decentralization for empowered local government to become “local development agencies”. This included work in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen, Tanzania, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Bhutan and Armenia. Freelance work included India, Nepal and Latvia. He started his professional working life in British local government town planning and urban regeneration.

Ronald holds a BSc in Town Planning from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, an MBA in business and a PhD in City Management and its Institutional Development Imperatives, both from Strathclyde University in Glasgow. He is a Chartered Town Planner (UK). He has published two technical books and 22 refereed journal papers, the two most recent in 2020, on urban resilience and a review of recent UK-funded urban programmes in Africa.