Africa’s urban slums result from unfavourable trade terms, UN agency says

Having achieved unfavourable terms of trade, African countries are poorer than they were in the 1960s and that new poverty has led to massive urban poverty, one of the biggest challenges facing the continent, the chief of the United Nations agency on housing policy said today.

Having achieved unfavourable terms of trade, African countries are poorer than they were in the 1960s and that new poverty has led to massive urban impoverishment, one of the biggest challenges facing the continent, the chief of the United Nations agency on housing policy said today.

By 2015, the target year of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 40 percent of Africa’s population will likely live in towns and cities, but most of them in slums and shanties, Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director of the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) told the first African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD).

In sub-Saharan Africa, 72 per cent of urban residents are slum dwellers, according to UN-HABITAT.

“These figures harshly draw our attention to the fact that the majority of city dwellers are widely doomed to live in poverty and also in poor environmental conditions,” Ms. Tibaijuka told the weeklong conference ending today in Durban, South Africa.

Two-thirds of the existing urban population lived without adequate access to safe water, sanitation, transport and health services, Mrs. Tibaijuka said.

Slums, she added, “are places where hunger prevails, and where young people are drawn into anti-social behaviour, including crime and terrorism, for lack of better alternatives.”

Intensive negotiations have produced an eight-page conference document, “The Enhanced Framework of Implementation in Promoting Sustainable Towns and Cities in Africa,” on ways to reduce urban poverty on a continent where 20 million refugees have fled from fighting in their own countries to find asylum elsewhere and 25 million others have been internally displaced by strife.

With urbanization offering positive contributions to economic development, it said, “in a rapidly urbanizing Africa, the promotion of sustainable urbanization requires more than ever before strategic, integrated planning, consensus building, gender mainstreaming, capacity building, international cooperation, south-south cooperation and conflict resolution systems.”

It called on national and local governments to adopt inclusive processes for making decisions on mobilizing local resources and allocating resources judiciously.