Juma Assiago is an Urbanist and Social Scientist, a graduate in Sustainable Urban Development from Oxford University (UK). He currently coordinates the Global Safer Cities Programme at UN-Habitat. He has over 20 years of experience working in programme development with national and local governments and in the development and implementation of municipal-wide crime prevention and urban safety strategies in Africa, Latin America Carribean, Asia Pacific and Eastern Europe. He has developed a vast network of implementing partners under the Global Network on Safer Cities (GNSC). A significant achievement of this work has been the adoption by member states of UN systemwide Guidelines on Safer Cities and Human Settlements in 2019, validating the working approach practiced at the city level. He is currently focussed on the provision of technical advisories to cities and in the piloting of an urban safety monitoring tool aligned with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Urban Agenda.

Franz Vanderschueren has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the La Sorbonne University in Paris, he was the general coordinator of UN-Habitat’s Safer Cities Programme from 1996 to 2001 and he has been a consultant to UN HABITAT, IDB, and UNDP, with extensive international experience.
In Chile, he has participated as director and supervisor in various projects at the national and regional level. In Mexico, he has supervised prevention practices in more than twenty municipalities. In Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina he has advised cities on prevention tasks. He has published on several issues related to citizen security, in particular on prevention aimed at young people and on citizen security models developed by cities. Currently, he is a Member of the Board of the International Centre for Crime Prevention (ICPC), Montreal, and Technical Advisor of the Global Network on Safer Cities (GNSC) since 2012.