Supporting towns and cities to achieve the MDGs: improving the lives of slum dwellers.

• Author: Tibaijuka, Anna

It has been eight years since world leaders made a commitment to eradicate extreme poverty through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These Goals are aimed at achieving universal primary education, empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and forging a new partnership for development.

The MDGs are people-centred, time-bound and measurable. They are simple yet powerful objectives that every woman, man and young person in the street, from Washington to Monrovia, from Jakarta to Nairobi and from Oslo to Cape Town, can understand. They have political support because they mark the first time world leaders have held themselves accountable to such a covenant. However, we are painfully aware that many people, especially the urban poor, do not know enough about the MDGs. This is because the change advocated is still not reaching slum dwellers in the inner cities, where the Goals have to be implemented--at street and neighbourhood levels--with municipal, provincial and national government working in partnership with the communities.

By 2050, six billion people--two thirds of humanity--will be living in towns and cities. And as urban centres grow, the locus of global poverty is moving into these towns and cities, especially into the burgeoning informal settlements and slums of the developing world. For this reason, we need surveys, facts and figures, as well as indicators to map out clearly how we can accomplish the Goals in the poorest communities. We have found this to be a complex aspect of how we at the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) and our partners apply ourselves to MDG 7, target 11--achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. If we are to bring hope to the urban poor, we need innovative governance as well as local thinking and reporting. Equally importantly, we need to support our towns and cities, indeed our countries, to adopt pro-poor policies and strategies that will obviate the need for further slum creation.

In backing these Goals, rich countries have for the first time accepted their share of responsibility to support the efforts of poor countries, through better and more focused aid, debt cancellation and fairer trade. Developing countries have accepted their share, through better use of resources and initiatives on democracy, accountability...