UN calls for joint efforts to tackle urban poverty

The UN Human Settlements Program (UN-HABITAT) Governing Council kicked off its 21st session in Nairobi on Monday with a call for improving quality of life to achieve sustainable urban development.

UN-HABITAT Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka said unless the majority of households enjoyed some measure of welfare, which accrued from productive employment, sustainable urban development was likely to remain an illusion.

She said the UN housing agency has unveiled a six-year strategic plan to stabilize the unplanned and chaotic aspects of urban growth and unleash the productive potential of the urban poor.

Tibaijuka said sustainable urban development will also likely remain an illusion if the urban poor, who are the majority of the urban population in most developing countries, are excluded from decision-making and from being full urban citizens.

'The proposed six-year Medium-term Strategic and Institutional Plan for 2008-2013 is pivotal to this vision. It will maximize our collecting chances of success. It recognizes that sustainable urbanization requires a stakeholder-supported roadmap,' Tibaijuka told housing ministers and urban planners from 100 countries across the world.

'The plan calls for ongoing and increasing alliance building with all those committed to making a difference. This implies first and foremost that we work with member states to develop effective policies and strategic to meeting the social, economic and environmental challenges of rapid urbanization,' she said.

Tibaijuka, who is also the director general of the United Nations Office in Nairobi (UNON), said the increase of slum dwellers would be caused by rural urban migration, increasing poverty and insufficient investment in new low-income housing.

'We must work together like never before to stabilize the chaotic aspects of rapid urbanization and begin to reverse the trend of the urbanization of poverty and slum formation, including slum prevention through participatory planning and land tenure reforms with a gender perspective,' she said.

Tibaijuka said the plan calls for the introduction of a revolving fund mechanism to move the process of addressing rapid urbanization forward.

The UN says sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest urbanizing regions in the world where the slum population accounts for over 70 percent of the urban population.

The world's urban population is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 1.78 percent between 2005 and 2030, almost twice the growth rate of the world's total population.

But in many developing countries, the UN says, poverty is already becoming a severe, pervasive and largely unacknowledged feature of urban life.

The week-long Governing Council session will examine UN-HABITAT's work and relationships with its partners in detail.

Composed of 58 member countries of the United Nations, the governing council is a high-level forum of governments at the ministerial level that meets every two years to set UN-HABITAT's policy guidelines and budget.