millennium
23 July 2006
The World Urban Forum this week discussed ways to make city life sustainable
against a backdrop of rising urban populations as more than 10 000 delegates
attended its third session held in Vancouver, Canada.
This high level consultation provided an opportunity for delegates to share
their experiences in addressing urban poverty and will enable them to be better
placed to build both national and international consensus necessary to
strengthen these issues in national poverty reduction strategies.
The forum explored, amongst others, questions on why urban poverty and
investments in housing and infrastructure for the poor are so rarely mentioned
in national poverty reduction planning.
With about a third of city dwellers living in slums, urban poverty was high
on the agenda at the five-day forum. âIt is now a generally accepted truth of
our time that urbanisation will throw up one of the biggest challenges," said
South African Housing Minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, in a keynote address she
delivered at the session. "When coupled with poverty it creates the complexity
of problems that we seek to unravel today. Within the context of developing
continents, the two are inextricably linked. And this is why urban shelter has
become such a pressing issue. For nothing defines the reality of the developing
world more starkly than through this prism."
Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, who addressed the plenary in her capacity as chair
of the African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development
(AMCHUD), said that in order to fully understand social exclusion it was
necessary to bring poverty urban poverty in particular back into the centre
discussions on development. She noted that the international community
currently devoted only two to 12 percent of donor funding to urban areas, as
the bulk of assistance was still focused on rural areas.
âJust as the world had united in the fight against Nazism during and after
the Second World War, it must now unite against the common scourge of poverty.â
Quoting the Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace laureate, Elie Wiesel, Minister
Sisulu warned that indifference was tantamount to a crime.
At a plenary on the second day, the Shack Dwellers International called on
the world to emulate South Africa as the countryâs experience had shown that
the inclusion of the slum communities in finding a solution was essential.
Shack Dwellers International and other organisations therefore needed
government support. They had the answer to their problem saving schemes. All
they required was support and their efforts only bode well for governments.
AMCHUD was represented by Housing Ministers from Senegal, Uganda, Tanzania,
Kenya, Algeria and South Africa. The Ministers benefited from the myriad of
issues discussed and they made sure that issues related to urbanisation in
Africa were well represented in all the forums. âThis is in line with a
resolution made by African governments at the inaugural meeting of AMCHUD in
South Africa in February 2005 where they committed themselves to pay more
attention to housing because this was at the core of urban poverty,â said
Minister Sisulu.
In his message delivered by Ms Inga Bjork-Klevby, Assistant
Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) and Deputy Executive Director of
UN-HABITAT, Secretary-General of UN, Mr Kofi Annan outlined the darker side of
rapid urbanisation in the world.
He said more than half the urban populations in the developing world now
live in slums with little or no access to decent housing, clean water, basic
sanitation, regular jobs or steady income. Such was the despair, he said, that
families were forced to choose whether to send their children to school or
whether to use them to fetch water.
"In this interdependent world, opportunity and deprivation are interlinked,"
Mr Annan said. He noted that the consequences of over-consumption and
pollution, hunger and deprivation, crime and insecurity knew no borders. If not
handled well they could generate intolerance, migration and even instability
and extremism.
The two-yearly meeting organised by UN-Habitat is a chance to share
experiences and knowledge and aims to forge partnerships that will help deliver
the goal of balancing urbanisation with a city's ability to absorb new
inhabitants.
A UN report released ahead of the summit estimated that more than half of
the human race would live in urban areas by the end of 2007. The report
predicted that by 2030, 80 percent of people would live in cities.
An estimated one third of city dwellers globally live in slums with the
problem worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where slum-dwellers make up more than 70
percent of the urban population.
UN Habitat says increased urbanisation has created a range of serious issues
including access to clean water, sanitation, shelter, urban poverty, HIV/AIDS
and problems with urban governance.
Contacts:
Monwabisi Maclean
Cell: 082 88 22 962
E-mail: monwabisi@housing.gov.za
Issued by: Department of Housing
23 July 2006
Source: Department of Housing (http://www.housing.gov.za)
