Water BOOST Enabling Innovation for Future Ready Cities 2025

First illustration: Accra and Bengaluru The first example (Figure 16) compares Accra and Bengaluru, two rapidly urbanizing cities in the Global South, each with contrasting innovation capacities and governance structures. In Accra and Bengaluru, Water-BOOST reveals complementary strengths and areas for improvement that create a clear case for cross-city learning. Accra benefits from strong civil society and academic engagement, supporting multistakeholder collaboration (E5) and moderately aligned governance mechanisms (E1). Yet its aquapreneurship layer (A1, A2) remains underdeveloped, with limited investment pathways and few structured opportunities for scaling innovation. Bengaluru, by contrast, exhibits a more dynamic aquapreneurial and investor landscape (E3, A2), but continues to struggle with fragmented governance and weak regulator coordination (E1). These differences align with each city’s focus areas as identified in Section 3 of this report. By placing these cities side by side, Water-BOOST enables a two-way insight: Bengaluru can learn from Accra’s more cohesive regulatory-to-utility alignment (E1), while Accra could adapt Bengaluru’s investment and aquapreneurship mechanisms (E3, A2) to enhance its innovation capacity. More broadly, the comparison illustrates that even in cities where funding remains a major constraint, strategic peer learning can help identify different entry points or examples to strengthen investor ecosystems. It also highlights that it is not enough to support individual stakeholder groups in isolation – innovators and investors need to be embedded within systems where enabling mechanisms link them to public institutions, procurement pathways and multistakeholder platforms. Water-BOOST cross-city comparison and adaptation between Accra and Bengaluru cities FIGURE 16 Source: World Economic ForumAccra Bengaluru A2 Missing stakeholder groupG2 E3 E2G1 E5 A1A1 Weak stakeholder groupE1 E4Compare and adapt E1 from Accra to Bengaluru Compar e and Adapt A1 & A2 from Bengaluru to AccraMissing enabler Missing enablers A2G2 E3 E2G1 E5 A1A1E1 E4 Weak enabler Weak enablersWeak enabler Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities 37