SUMMARY
Summary
Some of DFID's work to address urban poverty is impressive and is making a noticeable contribution towards meeting the Millennium Development Goal 7 target on slum upgrading. However, the Department needs to sharpen and refine its approaches to urban poverty. The last five years have seen rapid urbanisation, almost all of it within developing countries, yet DFID—along with other donors—has downgraded its support to urban development over this period. This process should be reversed.
The Department overwhelmingly focuses its efforts to address urban poverty in Asian, rather than African, countries. This balance needs to be redressed. Africa is the world's fastest urbanising region and it has the highest proportion of slum dwellers. Without a new and comprehensive approach to urban development in Africa, a number of cities could face a humanitarian crisis in as little as five years' time, given the huge expansion of their urban populations. Addressing urban poverty offers the opportunity to tackle wider development issues such as: unemployment and crime; social exclusion; population growth; and climate change and the environment.
The urban context presents specific development challenges, especially relating to the provision of basic services such as health, education, sanitation and water. DFID opts not to distinguish between urban and rural interventions in most of its programmes. This has reduced the visibility of urban poverty within the organisation. Nowhere is this more evident than DFID's recent White Paper, which contains just three references to the urban context. We believe that a lack of visibility has led to a (possibly unintended) downgrading of urban poverty within DFID, with a concomitant dismantling of in-house expertise.
A specific focus on urban poverty should be re-established within DFID, united around a new strategy document. This could be achieved largely by reconfiguring, rather than supplementing, existing staffing, especially if DFID were to make greater use of external expertise and research.
A modest but highly targeted increase of financial resources for urban poverty would enable DFID to support other stakeholders to achieve widespread gains in slum upgrading and urban development. In many cases, the pre-requisites for rapid and sustainable urban development are already in place—including effective vehicles for delivering this support, such as the Urban Poor Fund International and the Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility. New or additional DFID funding for these initiatives is necessary to maintain their momentum. The provision of additional core funding to UN-Habitat would boost this agency's ability to pursue urban development priorities.
The presence of urban expertise within all its major country programmes would equip DFID better to support community-led solutions to urban development challenges. The current practice of drawing Headquarters and country-based urban advisers from the Department's infrastructure staff fails to properly recognise the multi-sectoral nature of urban poverty. A wider range of professions, including social development, climate change and governance, should be represented.
A further source of expertise lies within UK local government. DFID should provide small-scale funding to support UK local government experts in building capacity and mutually beneficial partnerships with their counterparts in municipal authorities within developing countries. This will require closer and more effective collaboration between DFID and the UK Department of Communities and Local Government.
Urban poverty is complex. But deploying resources in urban contexts can be highly cost-efficient and deliver sustainable benefits to many millions of the world's poor. By recalibrating its own approach, DFID will have greater capability to play a leading role in helping to build political will within the international community to pull millions of people out of urban poverty.
|
|
|
