DEVELOPMENT: Sex and the Mega-City

Jare Ajayi

VANCOUVER, Jul 3 2006 (IPS) – As the World Urban Forum here drew to a close last weekend with vows to work harder to solve the global housing crisis, women at the meeting stressed that gender sensitivity must be included in policies to upgrade the atrocious living conditions currently endured by millions of human beings.
The five-day conference, which attracted an estimated 10,000 people from 100 countries, was organised to provide a venue for creative problem-solving on issues surrounding rapid urbanisation and decent housing.

Over the next three decades, the urban population of developing countries is set to double, from two to four billion. And many people will be concentrated in mega-cities by 2015, there will be an estimated 23 cities with a population over 10 million, of which 19 will be in developing countries.

Marni Kellison of the Montreal-based non-governmental organisation Power Camp National/Filles D Action, says that the effect of rapid urbanisation is often felt most by women and children, and women need to be represented as crucial stakeholders in urban sustainability .

For example, women almost always have primary responsibility for raising children, and for ensuring sufficient resources to meet children s needs for nutrition, health care and schooling. Women living in slums are also more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than their rural counterparts.

Experts note that as women join the migration from rural to urban areas, they often become more vulnerable to economic and sexual exploitation, but they are also exposed to new opportunities in terms of education and reproductive rights.
However, for slum dwellers, pollution, dirty water and overcrowding make daily life a struggle just to survive.

Inadequacy of housing and basic infrastructure like plumbing and electricity, as well as the generally lacklustre response of government decision makers, were the main concerns of Iyabo Ogunyannwo, an urban development official from Abuja, Nigeria.

While urging governments to make living in cities less stressful , Ogunyannwo said that her country, like many others in the developing world, is still struggling to meet the challenges of urbanisation and the accompanying strain on municipal services.

Population is being mentioned as the problem, and resources, but I don t think so. I believe that the resources are there, she told IPS. The trouble is that politicians have not realised that cities are the engines of any nation. We need to invest in our cities to make them attractive to foreign investors so that our people can live well.

An administrator with Nigeria s federal government, Ogunyannwo regretted that city planners are not getting the cooperation they need from national policy-makers.

You must plan before utilising any space so as to maximise its benefit, she noted, adding that women and children remain the most vulnerable to the disease and insecurity that prevails in hostile living environments. This is why we are worried that the pace of providing required houses for the needy is too slow.

Ogunyannwo said that under a newly launched national plan, the government is providing 500 housing units for low-income workers in each of the state capitals.

But she worried that given the country s population of about 130 million, this will fail to dent the problem unless it is replicated several times over and taken beyond state capitals. Nigeria has 36 state capitals but other urban centres running into the thousands.

Maryanne Kimuyi of Kenya told a similar story. Housing built by private developers is beyond the reach of the average worker, and even the low-income housing offered by the government costs about 1,300 Kenyan shillings, when the average low-income worker earns just 21,000 shillings a year.

The situation would have been a bit better were there mortgage facilities from which workers can draw, she said. Unfortunately, each person is expected to go to the bank to negotiate. And as you know, banks, in the pseudo-capitalist economy, would hardly give a loan to a person without much capital as collateral.

Kimuyi believes that government can and should do more by making it possible for poor people, especially women with children, to get mortgages to buy their own homes.

Winifred David, who works with the Port of Spain Corporation in Trinidad and Tobago, said that her country, along with three neighbouring Caribbean states, has just formed a body that is working to make affordable housing available on a large scale. According to her, women are particularly favoured.

Jennifer Pepall of the Canada-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC) said her group made assisting women a special priority in its projects. The IDRC is currently working in five cities around the world for the purpose of accelerating urban development.

The cities include Dakar in Senegal; Kampala in Uganda; Colombo in Sri Lanka and Jakarta in Indonesia; and Moreno in Argentina. Four other cities will be selected before the end of the year in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

All these issues are becoming even more pressing as officials and development activists assess progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), approved at a U.N. summit of 189 world leaders in September 2000, and which include promoting gender equality and improving the lives of at least 100 million urban dwellers by the year 2020 .

Sisa Njikelana, a South African member of parliament, concluded that solutions should not be limited to the provision of infrastructure and services, important as these are. Rather, the kind of healthy urban life we are talking about is one that is human-friendly. One in which money is not placed above our humanity.