Belize City Mayor and Deputy to Rwanda

Bernard Wagner

Leaving Belize on Friday en route to the Central African country of Rwanda will be Belize City Mayor Bernard Wagner and his newly installed deputy, Allan Pollard. Both officials will attend the Commonwealth Local Government Forum, to which Wagner is a board member. The forum is funding the trip for the municipal heads to sit in discussions over sustainable urbanization post-COVID. Wagner told us what he expects to come out of the forum.

Bernard Wagner, Belize City Mayor

“How do we address or the increase in people living in cities and really not having the economic stability to really fend for themselves; and what happened there is just like what happened in Belize City – that people not having – they are suffering through poverty, obviously, and now they have to be squatting on government lands and unplanned urbanization which involves squatting, and that leads to poverty; it leads to further environmental degradation, it leads to crime, a sort of hopelessness and the focus of the conference is how do we across the entire Commonwealth address these issues that are facing these human beings and how do cities plan human settlements and cities going into the future, given the fact that within the next – by 2050 another two billion people in cities and that is one of the challenges that many of the cities in our region are facing.”

The two city officials return home next week Saturday.