Education > Side Story

Making Sister City Relationships Work

A naming ceremony in St. Louis, Senegal was attended by friends from the U.S. sister city, St. Louis, Missouri.

"Without continual maintenance, sister-city relationships can fall by the wayside."

Sister city relationships allow people in the U.S. to get involved in the developing world, see for themselves how people live, exchange ideas, and help improve the lives of others.

Without continual maintenance, however, the relationships can remain symbolic or fall by the wayside. I spent my first year at City Talk, a BAIDO member based in San Francisco, researching which US cities had existing sister city relationships - particularly with Africa. Calling cities from the long list of names, I would ask the mayor's office about the sister city.

Often the response was, 'Oh yes, we're not doing that anymore,' or even, 'Where is that?' In some cases, they said, 'Never heard of it,' or 'That was the old mayor.'

Given that kind of disappointing start, it was really encouraging to go to the 11th annual conference of U.S.-Africa Sister Cities, a subgroup of Sister Cities International (SCI), in San Francisco in April. The conference, organized by the San Francisco-Abidjan (Ivory Coast) sister city committee, addressed the issues of AIDs and debt relief.

I don't know how political many of the attendees were; I think most of the ones I met just loved Africa. Most were African American, and I could tell they felt a special kinship with their sister cities, a strong desire to get involved and get educated.

The president of Sister Cities International told me that most American sister-city relationships are initiated by an ethnic group wishing to form a link with the old country, the home country. The black American - black African connection drives many (though not all) of the US - Africa sister city relationships. Tim Honey, the SCI President, told me that this was true of other ethnicities as well.

In the Bay Area, Berkeley has a relationship with Gao, Mali, and Oakland has one with Sekondi Takoradi, Ghana. African sister cities are very popular at the moment and there's a certain push at the national level to increase the number of those relationships. At the moment, City Talk is trying to pair off Entebbe, Uganda (pop. 90,000) with a city in the Bay Area.

Clearly, a sense of ethnic connection helps to get a sister city relationship off the ground. But many of the relationships have become a bit exclusive, in that it's only certain people in a community that will go to see the sister community. Our idea at City Talk is to put a broader cross-section of people in a position to communicate with people in Africa.

We are developing interactive Internet tools to enable better communication between community groups in the cities. Were schools and colleges to integrate these into their curricula, it could bring a liveliness to the interactions that can't be provided by letters - which take a long time and often get lost in the mail.

I'm looking forward to the day when many more people in the U.S. can discover how much they have in common with an overseas community - and discover, also, more about their own place in the global scheme of things.

Nicola Swinburne is Project Director of City Talk, an Earth Island Project, and International Editor at Earth Island Journal. Contact her at (415) 788-3666 x117, or email city-talk@earthisland.org.