Slumdwellers Factsheet

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Millennium Development Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

• Target 11: Improve the lives of at least 100 million slumdwellers by 2020.

Key messages

• Slums are the physical manifestation of poverty, inequality and social exclusion in urban areas. Slumdwellers live in neglected parts of towns and cities where housing and living conditions are appallingly deprived and often hazardous, and where basic services are lacking. Slumdwellers are not valued as members of the urban community and have few rights. In many areas they live under the constant threat of eviction.
• Target 11 is an international recognition that slums are a development issue that has to be faced. The target is now interpreted to mean improving the lives of at least 100 million slumdwellers while helping cities to grow without new slums.
• Slum households are defined by UN-Habitat as households that lack decent water supply, adequate sanitation facilities, sufficient living area (not overcrowded), decent structural quality and/or security of tenure.
• Secure tenure is one of the most essential elements of shelter. Insecure tenure inhibits investment in housing, distorts land and services prices, reinforces poverty and social exclusion, causes severe stress and illness (through eviction/threat of eviction) and has the biggest impact on women and children.

Facts and figures

• At present, there are about 900 million slumdwellers and if current local, national and international policies continue, this could rise to an estimated two billion by 2020.
• Almost half the population of African and Asian towns and cities live in slums, with figures for individual towns and cities ranging from 30-70 per cent.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 72 per cent of the urban population lives in slums. This compares with 36 per cent in East Asia, 58 per cent in south-central Asia and 32 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• There are estimated to be 570 million slum dwellers in the Asia-Pacific region alone.
• Slums are not only a large city phenomenon. Many towns and secondary cities have a high proportion of their populations living in slums.

Are we on track to meet the target?

No. We will not meet the target without radical changes to current policies and approaches. Without significant local, national and international policy changes it is estimated that there could be almost 2 billion people living in slums by 2020.

Improving the lives of at least 100 million slumdwellers is a modest target which could be achieved without high costs, yet it is currently not on track to be achieved in any country.

Obstacles to improvement

• In many countries, urbanisation is rapid and policymakers and planners are often unwilling or unable to keep up in terms of planning for shelter and basic services, or to invest the public expenditure needed. Slums are often seen as temporary, when in fact they have become a permanent form of urban settlement. Targeted interventions around services, housing improvements and tenure security will improve conditions in existing slums. But more extensive policy changes are also needed, to improve land markets, to improve poor people’s access to credit, and to tackle the lack of political will.
• National governments and the international donor community need to acknowledge that poverty cannot just be addressed by programmes in rural areas, where the majority of the poor still live. There needs to be a more joined-up approach and recognition of the connections between rural and urban poverty. As well as poor people who have moved from rural areas – often temporarily – the urban poor consist of urban dwellers who have become poor through job losses related to public sector reform.
• The urban poor work in a wide range of industry and services, but their economic contribution to the urban and national economy is rarely recognised.
• Slumdwellers have few rights as urban citizens and consequently little power or influence to change their circumstances. They have few or no basic services, low life expectancy and little access to justice. They are frequently the victims of crime and many live under constant threat of eviction.

Progress - what DFID is doing to help

DFID is supporting a number of organisations to reduce urban poverty. We have committed £3 million to Cities Alliance. By the end of March 2004, we had contributed £1.2 million to the World Bank urban partnership and spent £228,000 with UN-Habitat by the end of March 2004 with a commitment of £66,000 more.

DFID is also supporting a range of international programmes to promote private participation in infrastructure that contributes to growth and poverty reduction. (see case studies, below, for more details).

DFID is working to improve water and sanitation in urban areas (See environment factsheet for more information.

DFID has provided £1 million in funding for the City Community Challenge (C3) Fund. The C3 Fund is a two-year programme being implemented in Zambia and Uganda to build links between civil society and local government and reduce poverty in poor urban neighbourhoods.

DFID’s urban and rural change policy team is working with UN-Habitat and the World Bank to raise the profile of the MDG slumdwellers’ target and improve the methods that are being used to measure it at local and country level.

What the international community is doing

UN-Habitat is responsible for monitoring progress towards meeting Target 11. Visit their website at: www.unhabitat.org to get details of their programmes and initiatives including the Secure Tenure Index and the Urban Management Programme.

Cities Alliance is running a ‘Cities without slums’ initiative. Visit their website at: www.citiesalliance.org for more details.

The World Bank has many projects to upgrade slums. For more details, visit their website at: www.worldbank.org/urban/

Case studies

Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG)

DFID, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland have got together to form PIDG, which coordinates work to promote private participation in infrastructure. PIDG is currently funding a number of programmes, including:

• DevCo Advisory - a project operated by the International Finance Committee to provide governments with transaction advice on bringing in private investment and ownership.
• Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund - which provides long-term lending on commercial terms to private infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa. For more details, visit: www.emergingafricafund.com

Global Partnership for Output Based Aid

This DFID-funded Partnership focuses on finding new ways of ensuring sure that public funding is being used to deliver basic services to the poor. For more details, visit: www.gpoba.org/