Sister Cities (old)
Increased globalisation and internationalisation, as well as contacts within the EU and various networks, have changed the conditions for the international work. Sister city agreements and cooperation is however the oldest form of internationalisation. Today's sister cities cooperation is increasingly about establishing partnerships around concrete cooperation projects, where the benefits for different activities in the cooperating cities are tangible. Hence, the collaboration amongst the sister cities varies in form and intensity.
The sister cities of the city of Vaasa are:
Bellingham, USA, since 2008
Harstad , Norway, since 1949
Helsingør , Denmark, since 1949
Kherson, Ukraine, since 2023
Kiel , Germany, since 1967
Malmö , Sweden, since 1940
Morogoro , Tanzania, since 1988
Pärnu , Estonia, since 1956
Schwerin , Germany, since 1965
Šumperk , Czech Republic, since 1984
Umeå , Sweden, since 1949
Malmö supported Vaasa substantially during the hard times in the beginning of the 1940s. Therefore, Vaasa has both “Malmögården”, which today hosts a kindergarden and Malmönkatu (the street of Malmö).
Morogoro (Tanzania) is a friend city. In 2008, the City of Vaasa signed a cooperation agreement with the city of Bellingham in the state of Washington, USA, which in 2010 developed into the so-called Sister City Agreement . A cooperation agreement exists with Aunus (Russia) in the field of culture and education. In addition to this, the city of Vaasa has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese province of Rudong on November 24, 2016, and with Zhenjiang in 2017. The goal of the memorandum of understanding is to promote trade connections between the regions.