India – Unsung urban heroes

In spite of the current hiccups in economic growth, India is urbanising at an unprecedented pace. The metros are growing at 12 per cent on average, the large towns at 10 per cent. This uncontrolled growth is the result of lopsided policies promoting economic prosperity around population clusters. People flock to these already populated centres to engage in economic activities like the services, construction and urban transport.

Sadly, our cities are just not able to cope with these levels of growth. The result is the chaos we increasingly experience every day: traffic, transport woes, rising crime rates, corruption, lack of basic sanitation, pollution, slum and pavement dwellers. This chaos is ironically acting as a leveller for the middle class, the poor and women, young and aged alike. Never before have so many felt so insecure and so excluded.

It is easy to apportion blame on city authorities and politicians without really understanding the underlying causes. There are structural flaws like the inequitable allocation of resources, lack of planning, and absence of able governance. Combine these with the inherent societal flaws of caste, community, religious intolerance and greed and the result is a cauldron of chaos.

So what are the solutions to this massive urban chaos?

Let’s start with underlying solutions: sharing and allocating resources, mainstreaming migrant populations and the urban poor, skilling city managers, and participation in urban governance.

Fifty per cent of the urban population is poor. These are the people who keep our cities going; the street-vendors, household help, rickshaw drivers, construction workers, garbage waste removers are amongst these unrecognised stakeholders. Yet they occupy less than 5 per cent of the land and are allocated less than 10 per cent of the city’s budget for housing, basic sanitation and transport. No small wonder these vital stakeholders are turning increasingly resentful and sometimes hostile.

If these basic needs are met, this critical mass of people will no longer be part of the problem, but the solution. Understanding the aspirations of these migrant populations then is at the core of resolving the crisis of a burgeoning urban India.

I have often heard the former collector of Ahmedabad city K. Srinivas, who is now the Managing Director of Gujarat Urban Development Company, make a case for creating dedicated cadre for urban management on the lines of the administrative services. I cannot agree more. Our city managers are inadequately trained for the job. Most learn through experience, which often becomes obsolete in the face of the complex growth of our urban centres.

Urban management today goes beyond basic engineering tasks and involves clear strategies and multiple skills across sectors like public health, transport, security and housing. The work may be unglamorous but those who have succeeded have really been our unsung heroes.

Take, for instance, Devuben Parmar, a feisty woman living in the Guptanagar slums of Ahmedabad. The 2002 riots saw her galvanise people to rehabilitate and reintegrate women and children in relief camps. She turned that into a scalable model of 190 Anganwadis under the Integrated Child Development Scheme with an annual budget of Rs 1 crore. Devuben now runs an Urban Resource Centre, which links slum residents to government, NGOs and the private sector.

Yaqoob Pathan from the ghettoised Juhapura area of Ahmedabad built on his experience in the relief camps to promote a local NGO called Sankalp Mitra Mandal. The NGO convinced the Ahmedabad Electricity Company to lower connection charges for local slum residents and facilitated transparent connection and payment procedures. The public utility scale has now applied slum electrification programmes across the city.

Many of us leave managing our cities to authorities. Yet, there are these people willing to get their hands dirty. Often they go unnoticed but create the groundswell for a nationwide movement for change.

Source – Hindu Business Line

Zimbabweans live in fear of disease while it’s ‘raining cholera’

Shamiso Mushonga, eight months’ pregnant with her third child, feels like a prisoner in her two-room shack. She’s terrified that she or her children could be exposed to cholera if they walk the streets of their neighborhood in Budiriro, a densely populated slum on the outskirts of Harare.
She has good reason to worry. The disease has already killed her husband, along with more than 1,100 others. And the current epidemic shows no signs of abating.

Budiriro, a vast, squalid wasteland of shacks amid piles of refuse, is home to hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans. It has neither a sewage system nor a fresh water supply. With the rainy season now in full swing, pools of human waste, along with the runoff from the mounds of trash, collect in the streets, creating a virtual Petri dish for disease.

“It’s raining cholera, literally,” Mushonga said.

International aid agencies say conditions appears to be getting worse despite their best efforts to stop the spread of the water-borne disease.

“People are living in extremely bad conditions here,” said a water and sanitation expert with Doctors without Borders who declined to allow his name to be used out of concern for his security. “As you can see, there are mountains of rubbish everywhere. So, when the rains started coming, it washed all this rubbish and excrement through the area.”

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U.N. Tackles Rising Threat of Urban Hunger in Africa

High Food Prices Spur World Food Program, Usually Employed in Rural Crises, to Find Tactics That Work in Crowded Cities

MONROVIA, Liberia — Escalating hunger in African cities is forcing aid agencies accustomed to tackling food shortages in rural areas to scramble for strategies to address the more complex hunger problems in sprawling slums.

The United Nations World Food Program, the world’s largest food-aid group, has plenty of experience trucking food into rural Africa, responding to shortages sparked by drought, famine and war. But in urban areas — where, despite widespread poverty, hunger wasn’t a significant issue until recently — the hurdles are different.

A market in Dakar, Senegal; price increases have begun to put food out of reach of the urban poor in western African cities.

In the vast and crowded slums, with many unnamed streets and dwellings without running water or electricity, it is difficult to identify who’s most in need of help. Simply handing out food can disrupt cities’ informal markets, cutting into the livelihoods of those who earn a few dollars each day selling peanuts or fresh fish, or of small farmers who haul their produce to the city.

The WFP, which usually takes the lead on aid in coordination with smaller organizations, began considering new tactics last year when it saw an urban hunger crisis developing in Africa.

Though food prices have recently declined sharply along those of a host of other commodities, and 2008 brought bumper cereal harvests in much of the world, prices in Africa on the whole remain significantly higher than they were a year ago, according to a December report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

“The problem has just started here,” says Louis Imbleau, the WFP’s representative in Monrovia, the Liberian capital.

In Monrovia, home to around one million people, market stalls are stocked with fish, vegetables and rice. But Liberia, still rebuilding five years after the end of a civil war, imports more than 70% of its food and the urban poor have been increasingly strapped by rising prices.

The cost of a cup of rice has risen to nearly 50 cents from 20 cents, a huge leap for many families who live on less than $1 per day. Alice Joseph, 39 years old, who lives in a small settlement beneath an overpass in Monrovia, says she makes about $2 on a good day selling fish bought from local fishermen, and uses the income to buy rice and cooking oil to feed her husband, children and her aging mother. Often, she makes nothing; then, she says, “We drink water.”

Earlier this year, the WFP intensified its efforts to put together a program for African cities. In June, with a $500 million grant from Saudi Arabia, the aid group asked its directors in countries with high food prices, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, to experiment with cash and voucher systems that would avoid upsetting local economies.

The WFP is working with governments and local aid groups to create programs in the West African cities of Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, and Monrovia.

“We’re learning this as we go at the moment,” says Valerie Guarnieri, director of the WFP’s program-design division in Rome.

Similar programs have been tried before, but on a smaller scale, and in rural areas. The U.N.’s division for children, Unicef, started a successful pilot program in rural Malawi in April 2006 to help what it called the “ultra-poor” — often children whose parents have died of HIV/AIDS. Sometimes the oldest child cares for the younger siblings alone. Local leaders helped to single out such families to receive a small amount of cash each month.

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