|
The United Nations has designated the first
Monday in October every year as World Habitat Day to reflect on the
state of human settlements and the basic right to adequate shelter
for all. It is also intended to remind the world of its collective
responsibility for the future of the human habitat.
UN-HABITAT is delighted to announce that Indonesia has offered to
host the global celebrations of World Habitat Day this year. The
event is always celebrated on the first Monday in October each year
to reflect on the state of human settlements and the basic right to
adequate shelter for all. It is also intended to remind the world of
its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat.
The theme World Habitat Day on Monday 3 October 2005, is the
Millennium Development Goals and the City. This theme, chosen by the
United Nations, is to remind all of us that in the year 2000, world
leaders meeting at the dawn of the new Millennium, committed
themselves to launch a concerted attack on poverty, illiteracy,
hunger, unsafe water, disease and urban and environmental
degradation by adopting a set of eight goals. In September, the UN
General Assembly will hold a five-year review meeting to weigh
progress on the eight goals.
UN-HABITAT is working with a number of international and civil
society organizations, cities and governments to realize Target 11
of Millennium Development Goal 7 - improving the living conditions
of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020. We are also
working together on Target 10 of MDG 7 reducing by half the
proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking
water. Our Global Campaign on Urban Governance and our Global
Campaign for Secure Tenure enhance this work through a series of
UN-HABITAT programmes, mainly in developing countries, that shoulder
the heaviest poverty burdens.
The governance campaign seeks to boost the capacity of local
governments and those with whom they work to practice good urban
governance. It focuses attention on the needs of the excluded urban
poor. It promotes the involvement of women in decision-making at all
levels, as crucial for positive change in society. Our secure tenure
campaign is an advocacy instrument of the United Nations designed to
promote secure forms of tenure for the poorest populations,
especially those living in informal settlements and slums in cities.
Quest for a better urban world is by no means an easy task, as
demonstrated by the fact that since the Millennium Declaration the
global slum population has already risen by more than 75 million.
Already, half of humankind lives in cities. By the middle of this
century, two-thirds of the global population will be living in towns
and cities.
Yet nearly 32 percent of the world's urban population - roughly 1
billion people - lives in slums, mostly in or on the edges of cities
across the developing world. In process we at UN-HABITAT, the UN
human settlements agency, call the urbanization of poverty, the
locus of global poverty is moving into towns and cities.
In absolute numbers of slum dwellers, Asia as a whole has by far the
largest number at 554 million making up 60 percent of the world's
total slum populations, followed by Africa with 187 million (20
percent of the global figure), and Latin America and the Caribbean
with 128 million slum dwellers (14 percent of the global figure).
Compare that to the slum population of 54 million in the developed
countries making up just 6 percent of the global slum population.
It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to state that we are sitting
on a social time bomb, that this is a scandalous situation in our
modern world. The goals are also intended at making us think harder
and working better to make our towns and cities inclusive,
acceptable places of abode. Otherwise the urban time-bomb will start
ticking faster than ever.
The Millennium Declaration was adopted by Member States of the
United Nations in September 2000. It contains eight Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), ranging from eradicating extreme poverty
to combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. The MDGs detail
out 18 specific development targets, each of which has a target
figure, a time frame, and indicators designed to monitor the extent
to which the target has been achieved.
MDG Goal 7, Target 11
The United Nations system assigned UN-HABITAT the responsibility
of assisting Member States to monitor and gradually attain the
“Cities Without Slums” target, also known as Target 11, which is one
of the three targets of Goal 7, “Ensure Environmental
Sustainability”. Target 11 is: “By 2020, to have achieved a
significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum
dwellers”.
UN-HABITAT's Slum Indicators
UN-HABITAT has developed a household level definition of a slum
household in order to be able to use existing household level
surveys and censuses to identify slum dwellers among the urban
population. A slum household is a household that lacks any one of
the following five elements:
Access to improved water ( access to sufficient amount of water for
family use, at an affordable price, available to household members
without being subject to extreme effort);
Access to improved sanitation ( access to an excreta disposal
system, either in the form of a private toilet or a public toilet
shared with a reasonable number of people);
Security of tenure ( evidence of documentation to prove secure
tenure status or de facto or perceived protection from evictions )
Durability of housing ( permanent and adequate structure in
non-hazardous location)
Sufficient living area ( not more than two people sharing the same
room).
Monitoring Urban Inequities Programme
Slums are a physical and spatial manifestation of urban poverty.
People living in slums have little or no access to services such as
water, sanitation, and solid waste collection. Most of the housing
structures in slums are sub-standard and do not comply with local
building codes. Often, slum dwellers lack legal ownership of the
dwelling in which they reside or any other form of secure tenure. In
addition, slums are often not recognized by public authorities as an
integral part of the city. This is one of the reasons why there is
so little data on slum settlements in many countries.
UN-HABITAT works closely with other organizations and national
statistical offices to introduce specific questions and categories
to household surveys and censuses, in order to ensure that slum
dwellers are considered in the sample of households. With the
Monitoring Urban Inequities Programme, UN-HABITAT analyzes the huge
development differences within cities, of which slums are a part,
and translates them into policy results.
Guide to
Monitoring MDG Target-11
Source: http://www.unhabitat.org/mdg/ |
