# Aiding the World's Urban Poor



## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*UNICEF: Millions of kids live in urban squalor*
Associated Press 
Tue, Feb 28, 2012

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Millions of children are growing up in squalid urban areas and denied basic services despite living close to them, the United Nations Children's Fund said Tuesday.

UNICEF said children living in slums and shantytowns often lack water, electricity and health care and it urged policy makers to ensure urban planning meets the needs of children.

The agency said it is common for statistics to show that, on average, children growing up in cities are better off than those in rural areas, which often leads to missing the plight of poor, urban children.

"This conceals the fact that the greatest inequities are found within towns and cities," it said. "In most urban areas, great opportunity and great deprivation exist side by side."

UNICEF said more than one-third of children in urban areas don't ever get birth certificates, which means they are invisible to authorities and can't get into social programs. This rises to half of all children in parts of Africa and Asia, two of the world's regions seeing the fastest migration from rural to urban areas.

More than half of the world's population lives in cities and towns, including a billion children. By 2050, two-thirds of the world's people are expected to live in urban areas, UNICEF said.

Many poor children in urban areas don't go to school and instead are forced to work to help their families, often in dangerous jobs. Tens of millions of children live or work on the streets and "the number is rising with global population growth, migration and increasing urbanization," the report said.

Children are also vulnerable to people traffickers. UNICEF said nearly 2.5 million people are in forced labor as a result of trafficking, and a quarter to half of them are children.

Nearly 8 million children died in 2010 before reaching the age of 5, about a third of them from hunger, the agency said. The rest died of pneumonia, diarrhea or birth complications.

In urban areas poor sanitation and overcrowding drive up child mortality, UNICEF said.

"When we think of poverty, the image that traditionally comes to mind is that of a child in a rural village," UNICEF director Anthony Lake said in a statement. "But today, an increasing number of children living in slums and shantytowns are among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in the world, deprived of the most basic services and denied the right to thrive."


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## hkskyline (Sep 13, 2002)

*Rising tide of climate migrants spurs Dhaka to seek solutions *
_Excerpt_
26 April 2016










DHAKA, April 26 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - On the streets of this South Asian mega-city, jammed solid with rickshaws, honking taxi vans, cars, bicycles, sweating pedestrians and lumbering buses with their paint scraped off in tight squeezes, getting anywhere quickly by road is impossible.

The 100-metre drive from the airport parking lot to the first intersection can take half an hour. Getting right across town requires many hours. That's what keeps Sirajul Islam, chief urban planner for Dhaka South City Corporation, awake at night.

"Traffic," he sighed, asked about his main concerns for the fast-growing city. "Though of course there are so many worries."

Bangladesh's capital city of 20 million people is growing by close to 5 percent a year, in part as rural families migrate to the city seeking work or having lost their homes to worsening river erosion and storm surges that flood fields with salt water.

The stream of migrants, expected to surge as climate change problems like sea-level rise intensify, could double the already crowded city's population in 15 years, said Omar Rahman, vice chancellor of Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).

"We are in the eye of the storm here," he told participants at a conference on community-based adaptation to climate change in Dhaka this week.

WHATSAPP FOR GARBAGE?

But Dhaka is also proving a testing ground for solutions to deal with the rising tide of migrants, and with climate change.

In communities around the city, including some of the poorest slums, government agencies, researchers, non-profit groups, businesses and communities themselves are experimenting with ideas aimed at making Dhaka - and potentially many cities around the world - more livable in the years to come.

In poor neighbourhoods, communities are training emergency response volunteers, installing solar panels, starting community savings schemes and providing job training.

City-run efforts, meanwhile, aim to improve garbage collection and keep stormwater drains clear, in part by tracking street sweepers via Whatsapp on their mobile phones. Concrete roofs are set to be covered with gardens to provide food, trap rainwater and offer respite from soaring summer temperatures.

At Dhaka South City Corporation, responsible for the southern half of the city, managers from all departments now meet each Sunday morning to coordinate plans and make sure problems don't slip through the cracks.

"All the departments have responsibility for climate change now," Islam said.

Such government involvement is crucial in bringing about fundamental shifts to tackle climate change in urban areas, said David Satterthwaite, an expert on slums and urban poverty at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development, one of the conference sponsors.

Community efforts to adapt to climate change "can't work without local government", he said. "They can do amazing things but they can't... build water treatment plants or put in drains."

Fiona Percy, who coordinates the Adaptation Learning Programme for Africa launched by aid agency CARE, said many cities around the world need a "paradigm shift" to coordinate not just community and government action on climate change, but also wider development schemes and funding.

"In Ghana, when districts create development plans, climate change now has to be fully embedded," she told the conference.

But when the two are brought together, applying for money from funds designated just for climate change or just for development becomes more complicated, she added.

RETHINKING MIGRATION

IUB's Rahman said one of the keys to managing growing migration and climate change will be persuading more decision makers that movement from rural areas to cities is an effective form of adaptation.

"For too long we have seen that as an adverse consequence," he said. "Urban migration is not only inevitable, it is in fact very positive in terms of economic growth (because) urban centres... are really the drivers of the world economy."

The challenge, experts said, is that new migrants can't all end up in the same overcrowded cities.

"People come to Dhaka, they tell you, because that's where the money is. If you want to manage this process and spread it around, we have to make sure we develop other cities as attractive destinations," Rahman said.

That means investing in good sanitation, water and energy systems, health clinics and schools.

It also means improving education to reduce the chances that migrants will arrive ill-equipped to find jobs and support themselves, he said.


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## KarenBridges (Jun 23, 2018)

ssiguy2 said:


> The world's urban poor will never be able to lift their lot until they get proper sanitation and the emancipation of women.
> Women are half the population but make relatively few dollars. They need to able to get proper education, full equality rights and have control over their own sexuality to help bring down high birthrates.
> No matter where you go it is the nations that have high work force participation levels, high education, and political equality for it's women are the same one's with higher standards of living.


That, and also extra regulation of the number of births in the areas poorly suited for kids.


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