By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
May 14, 2013

Recently, the UK based organization WaterAid released a white paper presenting the case for strong and ambitious goals for the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector when creating the post-2015 development framework.

Recognizing that WASH plays a critical role in health, education, gender equality, economic development and sustainability, the report calls on framework designers to recognize the increasingly integrated nature of effective development, and to design goals and targets accordingly.

The paper emphasizes that there is still much work to be done before the current Millennium Development Goals can be met, especially with regards to access to sanitation, but that new ambitious targets are important to maintaining momentum. Many of the most important issues facing the WASH sector are highlighted, including the need to improve WASH services in urban and peri-urban areas, especially in slums.

The full report can be found here.

By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
May 9, 2013

The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN), a group formed by the UN Secretary General in August 2012 to mobilize scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable development, will soon be issuing their report, “An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development”, to the UN Secretary-General. Earlier this week, the UNSDSN published a draft of this report on their website and are inviting feedback from the public until May 22^nd.

The IHC will be providing our feedback, with particular interest to the seventh of the ten Priority Challenges of Sustainable Development included in the report: Empower Inclusive, Productive and Resilient Cities.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
May 1, 2013

Egypt’s revolution and the ousting of Hosni Mubarak has given power back to Cairo’s people, but has also forced the city to both legislate and reinvent itself. Some of the more unfortunate consequences of this chaos have been graffiti, traffic jams, riots and even sexual assault, and some citizens fear this post-revolutionary Cairo is on the verge of collapse. Others however, view it as the populist empowerment of a new urban class, a chance for communities to develop together. A recent New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman discusses how Cairo residents are adjusting to a government elected by the people but that continues to struggle with major city development issues.

Despite the differing perspectives on Cairo’s and Egypt’s fate, one clear outcome of the revolution has been the change in approach to the city’s informal settlements. Under Mubarak, the way to deal with the urban poor and informal settlements was to sweep them away, hoping to erect skyscrapers in their place and create “Dubai on the Nile”. Today, a call for a more modern approach to urban development seems to be growing in the post-revolutionary crowd.

Discussions center not around the demolition of slums, but on harnessing the power of communities that can be viewed as complex cities within themselves. Collaborations with and between slum residents focus on short and long term development goals, such as improving building materials or widening roads for emergency vehicles.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy, IHC)
April 26, 2013

This month, after an exhaustive consultation process, the government of Ghana released a National Urban Policy Framework and Action Plan to “facilitate and promote sustainable development in Ghanaian cities and towns.”

The Policy was developed over the past five years as an attempt to address the reality that Ghana, like much of Africa, is rapidly urbanizing. While Ghana was once nearly 80% rural, it is now estimated that at least 51% of the population lives in cities, and the policy attempts to address on a national level some of the challenges that come with such rapid growth.

Encouragingly, many organizations representing slum-dwellers and those operating in the informal urban economy were consulted in the drafting of the policy. Many of the 12 stated policy objectives address issues directly affecting the urban poor, such as adequate housing, efficient infrastructure and service delivery, and strong urban governance.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
April 24, 2013

Last week, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) revealed its 2013-2018 water development strategy. It is the first plan released by the agency that targets water programs, a sector that USAID spends over $500 million on annually.

The strategy focuses programming into two objectives: providing sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and managing water to increase food security. The strategy calls for all USAID water programs to fully align with the two objectives beginning in FY 2014.

We commend the U.S. development agency for formulating this strategy that targets the important issues surrounding water, and for the specific methods they have laid out to address them. To make larger strides in the water sector, USAID plans to give higher priority to countries with lower rates of access to WASH and to countries where higher rates of children under the age of five die due to diarrheal diseases. The strategy also calls for an increased focus on the two often neglected parts of the WASH trio, giving increased attention to both sanitation and hygiene.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
April 19, 2013

This week, the McKinsey Global Institute released an exciting free app for iPads. Called Urban World, the app allows casual and professional users alike to compare many of the world’s largest cities in an interactive and visual way.

The app opens to a picture of the world at night. The amount of light coming from different cities around the world can be seen as a measure of city size and location. From this map the user can click on any continent country or city to get more detailed information about the region.  Data on population, GDP and household income is available, presented in simple bright pie charts.

Two options make this app more interesting. First, data is available for not only 2010 but also projected for 2025. This allows the user to understand where major centers of growth are expected to be in the next 15 years. Not surprisingly, countries such as China and India expect dramatic increases in population, while some cities in Brazil are expected to increase GDP more than most.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
April 17, 2013

Tokyo, Japan is viewed as one of the most modern cities of the world. Not far from the high-rise Tokyo city-center though, some might be surprised to see a much different city. The surrounding residential areas of Tokyo resemble the low-rise high-density habitats more often associated with cities such as Mumbai. These areas are characterized by a lack of urban planning and private dwellings that double as shops in the daytime. These communities are not a blight of the city, but rather a vestige of Tokyo’s history of incremental development.

In an in-depth article from the Informal Cities Dialogues project, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava explore Tokyo’s developmental history and how its pattern of growth can be used as a lens to view how emerging cities might look to develop. The authors explore how a post-World War II Tokyo, a city half in rubble and bankrupt, placed the onus of rebuilding the city largely onto its citizens, while the government focused on essential needs, such as infrastructure and disaster relief. What slowly developed was an enormous unplanned settlement, an incrementally growing slum.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
April 11, 2013

Last Friday, John Podesta, the Chair and founder of the Center for American Progress and member of the UN High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda spoke at an event sponsored by the United Nations Foundation. The 5^th of April represented the beginning of the last 1000 days before the Millennium Development Goals expire on January 1, 2015, and the event highlighted not only plans for a post-2015 development framework, but also the critical need for continued efforts to meet all of the current goals.

Mr. Podesta gave some brief opening remarks about the progress of the High Level Panel as they prepare to release their final recommendations to the UN Secretary General in May, as well as his personal vision for future global development targets. The IHC was pleased to hear Mr. Podesta mention the right to own land as a foundational development issue, and to recognize the importance of addressing slums more comprehensively in any future goals.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
April 5, 2013

Forced evictions have been slowly taking place in Lagos, Nigeria for years. The rapidly growing city of 21 million people, the second largest in Africa, is struggling to balance a thriving economy that sees Porsche dealerships and Dubai-style shopping centers next to areas of abject poverty and suffering. Highlighting the city’s inequality, it is estimated that around two-thirds of its residents live in slums.

Last summer, the eviction of 30,000 residents in the floating slum neighborhood of Makoko garnered a brief outcry, but evictions continue. The New York Times’ Adam Nossiter reported this March on the grim reality of evictions in Badia East, a slum community in Lagos, where policemen and hired “Area Boys” – tough guys of the street paid roughly $10 each – and callously forced out residents reducing their homes to rubble.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
March 25th 2013

In the formation of their post-2015 development agenda, the United Nations has prioritized the input of citizens from all corners of the globe. Through the World We Want campaign, the UN is utilizing social media, online forums, events, and hand written letters to empower people to make their voice heard.

A component of The World We Want that has encouraged many to get involved is the My World survey, for which the UN is beginning to release the results. The simple format allows participants to select, from 16 options, the 6 issues they believe should be prioritized in the post-2015 agenda. Over 210,000 people from 193 countries have now taken the survey – some online, some through SMS/text messages, and around half via pen and paper submissions.

The results, broken down by demographics, are available on the website. They offer a refreshing quantitative assessment of what people really want in a development arena that can often be dominated by those with the best slogan or sound bite.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
March 22, 2013

On the Same day USAID released its first USAID Forward Progress Report, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) hosted USAID Administrator, Dr. Rajiv Shah, for a discussion on the role of international development and the reforms needed to make international aid more effective, accountable, and transparent.

Dr. Shah began the event with a keynote speech highlighting the progress and goals USAID outlined in their report. He explained the need to focus efforts in areas where they will make the greatest impact and the steps the agency has taken to do so.

Dr. Shah also emphasized the importance of utilizing local solutions to ensure sustainable change. He gave examples of treating individuals as partners rather than beneficiaries and of incorporating market-based approaches that incentivize local institutions and create domestic revenue to sustain efforts. He spoke of how the previous models of aid perpetuated more aid and how the goal now is aid independence. In achieving this, he explained it is essential to empower local agents, civil society, and governments, as well as the private sector.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
March 15, 2013

This week the Policy Planning and Learning (PPL) Office at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) released a draft of their upcoming new policy Sustainable Service Delivery in an Increasingly Urbanized World. The IHC was very pleased to see USAID release the policy in draft form, and solicit comments from the global development community. We have long advocated for an urban strategy within USAID, and while this strategy is narrow in scope it is nonetheless a major step towards increasing the effectiveness of urban programs.

The 30 page strategy acknowledges the transformational nature of urban growth, and the need to address the delivery of services such as food, healthcare, water, sanitation and electricity in cities. Among many other things the strategy focuses on political and financial security, accountability, pro-poor programming, public-private partnerships, and supporting municipal governance as ways to ensure sustainable service delivery.

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By Michael Hopewell
March 13, 2013

In the next 25 years, more than half of the poor in developing countries will live in cities, but U.S. assistance for international housing and urban services programs has all dramatically decreased in recent years.

IHC partner City Partners International recently announced the publication a new study on effective U.S. foreign assistance related to housing and urban services, The Past and Future of USAID Housing and Urban Programs. A critical study in a rapidly urbanizing world, the report chronicles USAID’s urban developmental efforts since 1960 while also identifying accomplishments and lessons learned for the future.

The report attempts to answer the question: what does 50 years of USAID experience tell us about new tools for foreign assistance to provide affordable shelter options for the poor and improve the lives of slum dwellers throughout the world?

More information about the report is available here. The Past and Future of USAID Housing and Urban Programs is now available on Amazon for Kindle readers here.

By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
March 8, 2013

Last week, the final chance for Congress to come to a budget compromise came and went. Despite being built as a measure to force compromise, presented as a package of cuts so disagreeable to both sides of the aisle that a new deal had to be struck simply to avoid worse, across the board cuts known as sequestration have been triggered. Thinking back to conversations that occurred at this time last year, it seems shocking that this has happened. The policy community in DC stated confidently that some new deal would be worked out, or if not, that Congress could strike down their own self-imposed deadline and replace it with something less damaging.

Like all other government agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State are evaluating how cuts will affect staff and programs. InterAction, the largest alliance of U.S.-based international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on the world’s most poor and vulnerable populations, put out a statement condemning the cuts and quantifying in real terms their damaging effects. According to a fact sheet developed by InterAction members Mercy Corps and Bread for the World, a 5.3% cut in the international affairs budget will lead to 321,300 less people per year getting access to improved water and sanitation, 2,914,286 fewer children annually will have access to quality primary school education, hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people will have relief and services cut, support in key security areas such as Afghanistan and Pakistan will be scaled back, among many other similar cuts.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
March 8, 2013

Today’s holiday, International Women’s Day, is a celebration of the progress that has been made in advancing women’s rights since activists first marched on this day over a century ago. And while the progress that has been made is commendable, there is still work to be done both domestically and abroad in advancing women’s equality.

The overall goals for the movement are similar for women globally, but the current struggles that women face are quite different when we look at developing regions of the world. The struggle for global women’s rights is intrinsically intertwined with many international development issues. In the case of urbanization, housing, and slums, women’s empowerment can be both a driver and an outcome of progress.

In rapidly growing urban areas, often slums, women experience high levels of poverty, reproductive health risk, sexual threat, and violence, as well as barriers to education, employment, housing, and basic services such as water and sanitation. In many developing countries, women face legal restrictions when attempting to access land as well as capital, keeping them from entering the formal business market. As informal workers, these women earn less and are more vulnerable to harsh working conditions and economic shifts. In addition to the consequences on the women directly, as informal workers these women are much less likely to pay taxes leading to reduced public revenue and lower investment in infrastructure, stunting overall economic growth.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
March 1, 2013

Monitoring and Evaluation has long been a challenge for the global development community, especially in the wake of disasters. While individual organizations have gotten far more adept at evaluating their own projects, coordination and standardization between organizations remains a major stumbling block in long term learning. As AlertNet blogger Abby Stoddard notes, when swift reaction is imperative, coordinating a response and managing information is near impossible when there are no defined roles or leadership between a large group of independent organizations.

Next week, the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) will hold its 28^th annual meeting in Washington D.C. This network, formed in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide, is comprised of many of the leading development agencies, donors and NGOs, and serves as a mechanism to improve humanitarian relief efforts through peer-to-peer learning and information sharing.

The network has 74 members including USAID and national aid programs from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, multiple UN agencies and international NGOs such as Oxfam, Care and the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Society. All are dedicated to improving the use of data, evidence and evaluation as well as information sharing and coordination.

This conference will explore evidence-based planning and evaluation, standardization and provide space for major organizations to brainstorm and learn from each other. More information about ALNAP and the conference is available here.

By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
February 28, 2013

This past month, the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), estimated that 4.1 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation facilities, a number that is much higher than the United Nation’s Joint Monitoring Program’s estimate of 2.5 billion. The discrepancy between the figures lies in how “adequate” is defined by each party when measuring sanitation access. While the UN measures hardware – toilet, latrine, or lack thereof – and how well it protects the user from contact with waste, UNC researchers focused on whether the waste was treated before it reentered the environment.

This disagreement in definition highlights the difficulty of categorizing access to water and sanitation, which is multifaceted, seasonal, and geographically variable, into a binary ‘access’ or ‘no access’.

Measuring treatment ensures that when a person achieves traditional “improved” sanitation facilities – perhaps gaining access to a latrine with a washable slab cover – they are not forgotten. Instead they can strive to achieve even higher levels of sanitation such as treatment of the waste.

On the other hand this higher standard might neglect the measurable health benefits of incremental improvements in sanitation facilities, before waste treatment systems are available. And while ambitious, it is unrealistic to believe that comprehensive sewerage systems that treat waste are a realistic, immediate solution everywhere.

How we measure access to water and sanitation in the short-term won’t necessarily be the standard for how we eventually define universal access. But as discussions around the post-2015 development goals continue, discussing these differences and defining exactly what adequate sanitation means is absolutely necessary.

Read more about UNC’s Water Institute here.

By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
February 20, 2013

This past Tuesday, the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) co-hosted a discussion on the current and future status of the U.S. global development reform agenda. The panel was comprised of representatives from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, USAID, Georgetown University, and the Center for Global Development.

The discussion, moderated by George Ingram, a senior fellow at Brookings, was focused around three main contexts: an administration that now has four years to implement development reform, a recent series of recommendations released by MFAN, and the President’s State of the Union address.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
February 15, 2013

This week, the global water and sanitation organization Water.Org launched a new campaign, championed by co-founder and actor Matt Damon. Designed to generate new interest in water and sanitation around this year’s World Water Day, the campaign is attempting to grab attention with something new: humor.

In a fictional “press conference” filled with other actors who volunteered to play reporters, the Academy Award winner announced that until the world can have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, he will be on a bathroom strike. Until this issue can be resolved worldwide, Matt Damon will not use the bathroom.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
February 13, 2013

The UN High Level Panel, formulated to devise a framework for a new post-2015 global development agenda, met for the third time earlier this month in Monrovia, Liberia. The visiting group, including Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, discussed the underdevelopment and poverty that many countries still struggle with.

One topic that was over-shadowed in these discussions is that of housing and land tenure. Critical issues globally, the tenure security and housing troubles of the host nation of Liberia were exposed by the “beautification” process ahead of the UN conference.

In an effort to clean up the city in advance of the event, dozens of families’ homes were demolished, mostly informal structures built on land abandoned by wealthy families fleeing the country during the previous civil war.  Unable to prove ownership of the land or housing, residents were powerless to stop the demolition. Aggrieved residents believe that the UN meeting was used as a pretense for the government to act on behalf of the wealthy land owners and demolish the temporary houses.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
February 7, 2013

In a New York Times article last Friday, Sam Loewenberg commended the Mumbai City Initiative for Newborn Health for publishing a report detailing the failure of a three-year urban health program. Acknowledging that no one wants to see a program fail, Mr. Loewenberg stresses the fact that learning from what didn’t work is at the core of successful scientific research, and that the international development community could improve dramatically if only mistakes were evaluated and shared broadly.

The program was a well designed maternal and child health program that had seen very positive results in rural areas. However, as is often the case, the project did not translate well into an urban setting. The needs, opinions and customs of slum-dwellers in Mumbai were structurally different than those of rural Bolivia, and the program was unable to adapt quickly enough. Despite a strong community consultation process, the needs of urban mothers were so different that the program was ill equipped to plan accordingly.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
February 6, 2013

The 27 member panel that met in both New York and London in the fall, convened again in Monrovia, Liberia this past week to continue discussions around formulating a framework for a new global development agenda following the expiration of Millennium Development Goals in 2015.

The three specific themes of the Monrovia summit were social equality, environmental sustainability, and economic transformation. The High Level Panel maintained its participatory structure, including an African focus for these meetings hosted on the continent. African citizens were encouraged to make their voice heard through the Ask Africa Now website, while international channels of input continued to be available through World We Want 2015 and the MY World survey.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
February 1, 2013

Andrew Burmon, an editor at the Huffington Post, wrote an article this week about the juxtaposition between the luxury tourism industry and the realities in slum communities in many developing countries. Discussing the income inequality represented by the all too common sight of high rise hotels built looking over informal settlements in cities such as Cairo or Mumbai, he weighed the moral consequences of staying at such places, against the potential economic benefits of promoting tourism of any kind, regardless of place.

This topic is not new, and anyone who has traveled in the developing world can attest to the occasional discomfort when faced with such stark pictures of inequality. However a new project, mentioned in the article, organized by the Global Post with support from the Ford Foundation, attempts to look at income inequality from the lens of U.S. experience.

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By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
January 31, 2013

Professionals and students from all 50 states and more than 55 countries will convene at Yale University this spring at the world’s largest global health conference. The two-day conference and its more than 300 speakers will present lectures and workshops covering several topics of global health, international development, and social entrepreneurship.

Of particular interest will be the lectures concerning water, sanitation, and hygiene, including two lectures from IHC partners, WASH Advocates.

Learn more about the conference here.

By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
January 23, 2013

Nairobi’s Kibera slum, the second largest slum in Africa, is characterized by poor access to sanitation, typical of such settlements. Latrines that are available to Kibera residents are often far away, unkempt, shared by dozens of people, and can be cost prohibitive. For women, journeys to these facilities can be dangerous, particularly after dark. For these reasons, many Kibera residents resort to simply using plastic bags and hurling the waste away from their homes, a practice known as “flying toilets”.

While most see the practice of “flying toilets” as an obstacle towards improving sanitary conditions in Kibera, one Swedish NGO is embracing the use of plastic bags in their novel approach to the issue in Silanga, a village of Kibera. This organization, Peepoople, have developed a biodegradable, self-sanitizing bag called the “Peepoo” that can be used at home.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
January 15, 2013

January 12th marks the 3^rd anniversary of the devastating earthquake that hit Port Au Prince, Haiti, killing over 200,000 people and destroying the homes of 1.6 million more. In the months after the earthquake billions of dollars were pledged from governments, multilaterals, and NGOs, aiming to “build back better,” a phrase championed by former President Bill Clinton.

There has been a lot of press around this anniversary sharply critiquing the international community for the lack of progress in Haiti, and the new and continued hardships the Haitian people are going through, as the country struggles to rebuild. The recovery effort has been disorganized, poorly planned, lacked substantive community input and failed to adequately strengthen the national government to take over in the long term.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
January 11, 2013

This Saturday will mark the 3^rd anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Much has been written about the recovery efforts that have taken place over the past few years, the challenges and mistakes that have been made, the successes that have occurred, and the lessons learned. Below is a roundup of the most relevant articles. (more…)

By Michael Hopewell (Intern, IHC)
January 11, 2012

In November 2012, UN HABITAT held a conference in Rabat, Morocco in an effort to share best practices on policies and the implementation of slum upgrading, eradication and prevention programs by local and national governments around the world. The three day conference was attended by delegates from 24 countries, representing national government departments, local authorities and civil society. Also in attendance were international NGOs, multilateral and bilateral institutions, UN agencies and academic experts.

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By Anjali Bean (Research and Policy Associate, IHC)
January 9, 2012

While the recent fiscal deal was a welcome if imperfect compromise for both sides, it only delayed major debt reduction decisions that will have significant implications for foreign assistance funding in the coming years.

The Budget Control Act of 2011 required Congress to come to an agreement on deficit reduction by the end of 2012, or face a series of discretionary spending cuts to both “security” and “non-security” accounts that neither party was pleased with. The legislation passed last week delayed these cuts, often called sequestration, until March 27^th, but reduced FY 2013 and FY 2014 spending caps already in place in order to cover the cost of the two month delay.

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