Urbanisation and Poverty - International Development Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 135 - 139)

TUESDAY 23 JUNE 2009

MR DAVID SATTHERTHWAITE AND MR LARRY ENGLISH

  Q135  Chairman: Thank you very much for coming in. Welcome, gentlemen. You were in the last session, so you have heard something of what we have been discussing. For the record, I would ask you to introduce yourselves.

  Mr Satterthwaite: I am David Satterthwaite. I am with the International Institute for Environment and Development. I also manage a grassroots fund which supports urban poor slum federations direct.

  Mr English: I am Larry English. I am the Chief Executive of Homeless International, which was set up by the social housing movement here in the UK. We work with organisations of the urban poor to enable them to generate sustainable solutions to short-term settlement.

  Q136  Chairman: Thank you. You have made your own submissions, for which we thank you. You are expressing some disappointment, I think, in DFID's lack of focus in this area. What do you think DFID's response ought to be, given that it used to have a team and it no longer does? Do you have a specific view as to what DFID should now be doing to respond to the increasing pressures of urban poverty and urbanisation?

  Mr English: I think urbanisation should have equal status to climate change. In an earlier submission someone made the point that urban is a context not a sector and I think that urban issues are multi-sectoral, require integrated approaches, not just within DFID itself but within DFID and the different sectors in the UK and internationally. That kind of consideration is a role that DFID can play. Mostly, the issue of urban development needs to be pushed higher up the agenda, not as a sector but as a context around which all these issues revolve.

  Mr Satterthwaite: I think each of the DFID country offices needs an urban expertise, and that expertise has been lost over time. DFID country offices have to learn to work with the urban poor direct and their own community organisations. In a sense urban poverty reduction is still seen as something we deliver for them. They have amazing capacities, the capacity to organise, to mobilise, to vote, to do things, to build, and we need much more support for their own capacities, so that aid is a dialogue and a mutual partnership, it is not a one-way street.

  Q137  Chairman: You have made a fairly radical statement, Mr English—and I am not disagreeing with it—that you want to put it on a par with climate change. Of course climate change has been pushed up the agenda and there is a climate change unit in DFID that has been expanded. Do you both think urban development requires a dedicated unit or is it something more organic than that. I take your point, Mr Satterthwaite, that you are saying it should be in country. Should there be something like, for example, the Conflict Prevention Pool, which brings together resources from the Foreign Office, Defence and DFID and what-have-you? In this context it would also need local government, for example, and many other departments, so that, rather than just a DFID organisation, it would be a cross-government organisation. I have put in rather too many questions there, but it is really to try to get a feel as to what you think. If you were given a free hand, how would you organise DFID's approach to this issue?

  Mr English: My experience in South Africa was that when housing was prioritised as a political issue it achieved a status which was cross-cutting. In any local authority, in any city, housing ran across the different line functions and had a mandate to supersede and to prioritise housing issues. That is because, from the centre, it was made an important issue. I think the same thing can happen, but obviously not housing as a narrow function. It needs to be recognised as cross-cutting; it needs to be managed. You mentioned the idea of a unit and I think it needs that kind of oversight. It needs people who understand cities not as infrastructure purely or as local authorities, but people who understand that cities—and cities are unique wherever they are in the world—require co-ordination. But it also needs authority. I think that should happen within DFID, but I also think, on the ideas presented about utilising local authority/local government association expertise and the third sector housing association expertise in this country, that those voices need to be at the table too. They also need to be included.

  Mr Satterthwaite: DFID has some very good urban specialists, but if there is no clear explicit policy they cannot bring their knowledge and their capacity to that. It is funny about climate change. I have been on the IPCC[6] for the last two assessments. What is the priority in urban areas to confront climate change? Good water, good sanitation, good drainage, good healthcare. The capacity of the poor not to live on flood plains and steep slopes. Dealing with climate change, at least in the next 20 years, is a good urban poverty reduction agenda. In a sense that is why you want urban poverty reduction to get up the agenda because that also is one of the main components for addressing climate change.

  Q138  Chairman: A passing observation is that most of Lagos is below sea level and it is going to have a population of 26 million in a few years time. It looks like a disaster waiting to happen.

  Mr Satterthwaite: Yes. Absolutely.

  Q139  John Battle: I was interested to listen to your comments about the capacities of people in poor neighbourhoods. My background before I came into the House was some experience in Latin America with dwellers in Sao Paolo and the whole urban question there. My information is a bit out of date. I served as foreign minister dealing with Latin America and South East Asia. That is where the fastest growing communities are and some of the pressure there, whether it is Jakarta again or Sao Paolo or, indeed, the African cities. I wonder whether DFID is in the right place. In your first response you referred to DFID's country offices, that they are not perhaps in the right places. Given the comments we have heard previously on the staffing restrictions within DFID, what scope is there for DFID to support urban development through other agencies? Are they in the right place for making the right connections? For example, should they increase their funding to UN-Habitat? How could they make more use of the research base that they have? Are they going in the right direction or would you re-direct them and say that the urban question is elsewhere from where they are going. As the Chairman said earlier, we spend a lot of time pushing them to refocus on agriculture again, rather than just building dams and engineering energy plants. What would be your response to that?

  Mr Satterthwaite: Some countries in Latin America and Asia have done a fantastic job on an urban poverty reduction agenda. Brazil certainly—both local government and national government has dramatically reduced urban poverty. Chile also. Mexico also. Thailand has one of the most effective urban poverty reduction programmes in the world. A lot of them have certain characteristics. A key role for national government, a key role for local government, a key role for civil society and those working together. I would like DFID to focus on the rapidly urbanising nations in Asia and Africa that do not have good national policy as of yet and to build that alliance between the representative organisations of the urban poor, local government and national government. There are some helpful signs in India. In India the national government for the first time is taking seriously the funding for urban poverty reduction. It is still the very technocratic, top-down, professionally-driven agenda, not working with the knowledge and expertise of their slum dwellers.


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