Thinking Big - Responding to Urbanization in the Developing World

Introduction

Urban Lessons

Urban Success Stories

Introduction

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women. If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
In the 21st century, there are more ragged huts in the cities of the world than Walt Whitman could ever have imagined. Whitman would have appreciated, however, that there are also many great people in these challenging urban environments. One of the biggest challenges of the new century will be to harness their intelligence and energy to create vibrant cities that expand opportunities for all.

Canada cares about cities, first, because they are the incubators for development, and second, because in our rapidly 'urbanizing' world, cities need to deliver more than ever for their citizens. The Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA's) primary mission is to support sustainable poverty reduction strategies in the developing world and in countries in transition. Cities and towns are where many of these strategies must be realized.

This booklet presents the urban strategies of leading thinkers along with six examples of CIDA-assisted projects that are on the right track to building better cities.

The Glass Half Empty

The numbers tell the story. The United Nations (UN) estimates that, between 2000 and 2030, the number of people living in cities will jump from fewer than 3 billion to approximately 5 billion. Currently, about half of all human beings live in cities. By 2030, this figure will be 60 percent.

Only about 1.3 percent of this massive urban population growth (less than the population of Canada) will take place in developed countries while 98.7 percent (or almost twice the current population of India) of urban expansion will take place in developing countries.

The number of megacities-cities with populations greater than 10 million-will continue to grow, from five in 1979, to 19 today, to 23 a decade from now, with all of the new megacities located in Asia. The sheer size of these cities and their rapidly growing slums will continue to present enormous challenges in multiple areas, including governance, environmental sustainability, social development, and basic services delivery.

Many cities, of course, are already wrestling with intense growing pains. UN-HABITAT's report. The State of the World's Cities 2004/2005, describes " . . . growing poverty in many regions, deepening inequality and polarization, widespread corruption, high levels of crime and violence, and deteriorating living conditions with inadequate sanitation, unsafe water . . . " The report estimates that 43 percent of urban populations in developing countries were living in slums in 2004. In least-developed countries, an astonishing 78 percent of urban inhabitants were living in slums.

The Glass Half Full

But urbanization also has the immense potential to help humanity mobilize against poverty and environmental degradation. The same report that documents the ugly side effects of rapid urban growth reminds us of what cities can deliver:

"The experiences of developing countries in all regions indicate that urbanization is closely associated with increasing levels of income and improvements in social indicators, such as life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality and access to infrastructure and social services. Countries that urbanized earlier than others have higher incomes, more stable economies, stronger institutions and are able to better withstand the volatility of the global economy."

The creative thinking and resources available in cities are also important factors in the success of rural development programs.

Cities as Catalysts

Despite the profound challenge of addressing issues of poverty, health, education, governance, and environmental degradation in urban areas, there are good reasons why donors and global agencies should focus on cities and towns as gateways to international development. Among them:

• Efficiency. Cities are compact human settlements. The concentration of people in urban areas makes it much easier for resources to be mobilized and absorbed. Quite simply, more people can be reached with a given investment of resources in cities.
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• Receptiveness. Anyone emigrating from the country to the city has already made a commitment to change. Cities have thus always been hubs of innovation and creative solutions.
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• Economic Impact. Cities are the developmental engines of national economies. Cities create wealth: of the 55 countries ranked as most developed in 2003, only two have a population that is less than 50 percent urbanized.
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• Leadership. The decision makers and institutions most likely to set the pattern for any country's future are located in cities. Investing in urban and municipal leaders will support the development of solutions that are locally owned.
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• Decentralization. Many national governments are working to devolve responsibilities to local governments and are looking for ways to better incorporate civil society and the private sector. Investing in capital cities can have a positive influence on both national and municipal governments in promoting decentralization. Investing in smaller cities can help build the capacity of municipalities to take charge of their own development.
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• Partnership. Cities are clusters of expertise. Donors often act in cooperation with the private sector and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from their own and other countries to offer assistance. The head offices of most companies and NGOs are located in cities, making such partnerships more effective and accessible.
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• Human Security. While cities can be a breeding ground for conflict, they can also offer opportunities to improve human security, through processes such as democratic development, civic participation, and the forging of peaceful solutions to national or regional unrest.
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• International Commitment. Like other member states of the United Nations, Canada is committed to the Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction and environmental sustainability set out in 2000. Target 11 of Goal 7 calls for "significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020."

Thinking and Doing

The world's thinkers and doers are far from united on the question of what paths should be followed to create better urban communities. But they are united by a sense of urgency. We ignore at our peril the challenges that come with rapid urbanization.

CIDA hopes that this booklet will be useful in stimulating thought and discussion about new directions for supporting developing world cities in the 21st century.

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Urban Lessons

Unlocking People Energy

By Somsook Boonyabancha

Somsook Boonyabanchawas the founding Secretary of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights located in Bangkok, Thailand. She began experimenting with the concept of land sharing during the early 1990s as a way of arriving at settlements between slum dwellers and landowners. The following is an excerpt from her essay "Unlocking People Energy".

People are the spirit of any city. They are the creators: they provide the energy, the labor and the life that make cities function. It is time to look at them as the focus of city development. It is time to find ways (for) them to get involved in our growing cities, so that they feel a part of whatever has been (or is to be) developed in their local constituencies-communities, wards or districts, along their canals or around their markets. How can people and communities play a part in the planning, the decision-making, the doing and the managing of their cities? How can they grow and be healthy as their cities grow? How can we begin a process where, little by little, the city begins to belong to people-whether poor or not? This calls for a big leap-a change in the city development paradigm. How can the system make room for the force of people's creativity to spring up and flourish so as to create this new urban development culture?

It is important to open up larger space for people to come together and to take up development activities in their localities-activities like house-building, community upgrading, canal-cleaning, and recycling or revitalizing community markets. When a housing project is to be developed, for example, the people affected should be able to determine how they want to live together, how the social system is to be developed, what form their new housing will take, and what kind of management system will be instituted. Rather than have architects, planners or developers just planning all this on paper for them.

Similarly, if some environmental feature of a city (like a canal, river, lake, mountain, historic site or shoreline) has become degraded, people who live within or around it can help develop it and, in the process, become its protectors and maintainers. This would give people a sense of sharing in the management of their city and it will build relationships between them and their improved surroundings.

If we see people as the subject of development, we have to create space for them to participate more actively and to have a stronger sense of ownership of what happens in their constituencies. Instead of the city being a vertical unit of control, these smaller units-people-based and local-can be a system of self-control for a more creative, more meaningful development.

When local development initiatives come from communities, people become the doers, and feel that the development of the larger environment is part of their communities, part of their lives, part of their achievement. Canal-cleaning activities in many communities have led to many others, such as cultural events celebrating the long history of living with Thailand's life-giving waterways. These activities are the urban people's way of respecting nature, since canals bring water, life, wealth, fish, transport channels, income-earning opportunities-and a vivid reminder of our unignorable relationship with nature, in the centre of the city.

Development interventions should try to create space for people to be the doers, for them to be able to lead the development process with confidence. We just need to understand the techniques to unlock this people energy and to channel it into a creative new force for city development. This must be supported by adopting flexible financial management mechanisms to allow people the freedom-as a group-to undertake development activities they initiate or need.

Individual people in Asian cities now have a clear bilateral relationship with the state, but often very few horizontal ones among themselves. How can a single politician-or a set of politicians or government officials-possibly manage all the needs and aspirations of a city's five or ten million inhabitants even if given the power to do so? If we start building a lot of smaller constituencies within a city, where people start relating to each other-and sharing between constituencies-a lot of horizontal learning, linking, and creativity will start to happen.

A city is not a homogeneous unit. Cities are getting very, very big-many in Asia now number in the tens of millions-much too big to make sense monolithically. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that only gigantic sized policy decisions and mega-projects can tame and streamline these teeming, out-of-control agglomerations of humanity. But this kind of thinking leads to many of the unsustainable development attitudes that we labor under today.

It is possible to turn this around. If, instead, we look at cities as collections of many small, diverse and overlapping constituencies and allow the people of each to take part in developing their lives, their areas and their ways of relating to each other-with proper coordination-then the human element and scale can reappear. Cities will begin to be manageable by their own citizens.

Asian cities are clearly bewildered by their recent explosion of growth, but they can draw on a long and rich history of how to manage coexisting interests and diverse populations with diverse needs. If we open up space for this enormous popular energy and allow it to play a stronger part in the larger systems in our cities, we will start seeing a lot of exciting new management systems emerging, and new directions in sustainable city development by the people themselves.

Reprinted by permission of the author. Full version.

Letter from Brazil

By Robert Neuwirth

The writer Robert Neuwirthspent two years living in squatter communities in four continents. His new book, Shadow Cities is an attempt to humanize these maligned settlements. The following is an excerpt from an article he wrote for The Nation, July 10, 2000.

Rio de Janeiro

How's this for a progressive pipe dream? A self-governing, low-income neighborhood where the buildings are constructed communally. Where the houses are structurally sound-most made from concrete and brick. Where residents visualize the homes they desire-and then gradually create them, adding exuberant flourishes like sliding doors, spiral staircases, tile facades and hanging gardens. Where the community invests in itself and the streets feature nothing but locally owned businesses. Where people have created a place they are proud to call home.

This is no fantasy. It actually exists, created by the squatters who built the favelas of Brazil. Many Brazilians will tell you that the favelas are slums or shantytowns, but that is simply the dictionary definition. The favelas may once have been urban wastelands, but over the past two decades favelados have transformed their junkyard colonies into desirable neighborhoods, achieving something most illegal settlers can only dream of: permanence. Their new brand of self-help urban development could become a model for the rest of the world. Here are its two simple steps: Let the poor build, then work with them to stabilize their self-built communities. Mata Machado was the first favela I visited. It was a perfect initiation: small, separate, nestled in the tropical forest near Rio de Janeiro's Parque Nacional da Tijuca. This favela was born seventy years ago when a few families erected a series of shacks on an abandoned farm at the edge of the forest. Over the years, the residents made deals with contractors working nearby to pave their streets with leftover concrete. The city chipped in money to bridge a small stream that cut off the favela from the main road. Today Mata Machado is almost suburban: a bucolic community of modern houses on shady streets that fan out from a central plaza. The approximately 500 families that live here now hold title to their homes-and properties here command prices above $50,000. The average Brazilian worker earns between $3,000 and $5,500 a year, and many squatters survive on far less than that-some on less than $100 a month.

Halfway across Rio, in the working-class Caju neighborhood, Ladeira dos Funcionários fills a small triangle of land between a long-vacant tuberculosis clinic, a cemetery and a rail line. This favela is much more urban than Mata Machado-a community of attached row houses. Many have architectural features like tile facades and balconies. The city recently installed sewers and built a childcare facility. The favela also features a branch of the Caixa Economica, a government-sponsored bank. These days, the big issue in Ladeira dos Funcionários isn't improvements; it's controlling growth. Concerned about overdevelopment, the favela's leaders recently passed a rule limiting buildings to three stories.

And then there's Rocinha, a favela that runs up the steep hill that separates the wealthy beachfront community of São Conrado from the equally wealthy inland neighborhood called Gávea. Halfway up the twisty street that traverses the hill, I stood and took in the panorama. All around me, Rocinha was full of life. An estimated 200,000 people live here, and they have created a complete alternative economy: squatter apartment buildings, some rising five stories; more than a thousand squatter businesses-banks, butcher shops, modeling agencies, even video-rental stores-and a main drag with squatter restaurants and bars . . .

Three favelas, one message. "There has been a very radical change;" said Paulo Cesar Gomes, as he stood in the newly renovated central plaza of Ladeira dos Funcionários, where be has lived for thirty-two years. "The children of today have opportunities that we didn't have. You can hope to be a doctor. It's a reality."

Favelados like Paulo Cesar . . . would be the first to tell you that they didn't set out to do anything revolutionary. It wasn't ideology that brought them to invade land; it was need. And the favelados also acknowledge that they haven't done it alone. Both Mata Machado and Ladeira dos Funcionários have received infusions of cash from the city's six-year-old Favela-Barrio (favela neighborhood) Program, an urbanization effort that taps $360 million from the Inter-American Development Bank.

Still, despite the caveats, the favelas are inspiring. In Brazil poor people have proved that they can build self-sustaining neighborhoods.

. . . Brazil is one of the few places where squatters have transformed their domains into thriving neighborhoods. Here are some of the reasons why the favelados have succeeded where most other squatters have not.

• . . . They aren't anarchists or punks or people raging against the system; most favelados are simply trying to create a better life for themselves and their kids . . .
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• The squatters are shrewd and strategic. Early on, they recognized that one of the legacies of authoritarian rule was that there was a huge amount of fallow land under government control. So they tended to invade these parcels, figuring that politicians wouldn't have the stomach to push for eviction. Where they did settle on privately held land, the squatters tried to pick parcels where ownership was contested, betting that they would be less likely to be evicted . . .
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• The favelados also understand the need for coordinated action. Since a single person has a hard time erecting a house, the favelas became natural collectives. The residents united in mutiroes-cooperative building associations-and erected their dwellings communally. Those who couldn't contribute to construction-the elderly, the sick and people with full-time jobs-often provided food or money to the effort. The best mutiroes even built small health clinics and community facilities. Today almost every favela has an elected Associacao de Moradores-a residents' association-which sets policies for the community.
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• The squatters realized they had to work inside the system. Some favelas cut deals with local politicians-promising support if the officials helped them get city services like running water, sanitation or access to mass transit. And in a few cases, favelados themselves moved into politics . . .

The favelados have also been aided in their quest by a marvelous quirk of Brazilian law and by responsive governments. In contrast to the United States, where property rights are king, Brazil's Constitution explicitly protects squatters. According to the doctrine of usucapiâo, favelados may be entitled to the use (and possibly ownership) of a property if they have lived there for a long enough time without being challenged. The Constitution also states that the right to private property is subordinate to the "dictates of social justice," another clause squatters have used in court to protect their neighborhoods.

Also, after the transition to democracy, many city governments realized they needed to improve the favelas. Belo Horizonte, Brazil's fourth-largest metropolis, was one of the earliest to create ties to its favelas. It started a pilot program in 1979 and six years later set up URBEL, the Urbanization Company of Belo Horizonte, a nonprofit dedicated to improving conditions in squatter areas. Over the years, URBEL has helped 5,000 families take title to their properties through usucapiao. And it has completed hundreds of construction projects, paving streets, improving river banks, installing street lighting and sewers. The agency has also hired several hundred favelados to work on its programs. Today, URBEL has an annual budget of about $11 million.

Though it is an arm of the city government, URBEL is also in part controlled by the favelados . . . Favela leaders regularly meet with URBEL executives to discuss progress on important programs . . .

Of course, like any urban neighborhood, the favelas do have some serious problems. As in many cities, one of the principal issues involves crime. After decades of total neglect by the police, who refused to patrol the illegal neighborhoods, drug gangs and organized-crime outfits have set their taproots. In Rio alone, 429 favelados died violently in 1998-a murder rate more than five times higher than that of New York City. Residents of some of the wealthier neighborhoods that border the favelas have become increasingly concerned that the violence will spill over into their districts. Many favelas have also developed a home-grown caste system-and new arrivals can be greeted with suspicion . . .

What's more, the existing favelas have not been able to keep pace with the flow of immigrants to the cities. In Rio, I saw dozens of families who had created plywood encampments under highway interchanges . . .

Perhaps most serious, the favelados are bumping up against what might be called the difficulties of rising expectations. They are discovering that all their hard work doesn't guarantee success in the service economy. Despite Paulo Cesar's belief that his children can become professionals, Brazil's economy has been in trouble for much of the past decade-and it's been hard for younger favelados to make their way into the job market. The jobs their parents were glad to get-becoming maids, taking in laundry, working as laborers-are no longer plentiful . . .

Still, these problems don't negate what the favelados have achieved . . .

How wonderful to be in a country where a squatter isn't automatically a criminal, and where illegal houses can be more desirable than lawful homes.

Reprinted by permission of The Nation.

Completing the Revolution

By Akin L. Mabogunje

Akin L. Mabogunje, retired chairman of the Development Policy Centre in Ibadan, Nigeria, has served as co-convener of the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability. He is the author of several books on development, including State of the Earth. Mr. Mabogunje made the following presentation to the Public Policy Forum of the Cities Alliances, in Kolkata, India, in 2001.

Iwant to start by calling attention to the fact that Africa is increasingly facing urbanisation as a problem. Asia has had it for quite some time and in some senses you might say it's become déjà vu. For us in Africa it is very new for many of our countries. If you take my country, Nigeria we were only 17 percent urban in the 1960s-now we are over 36 percent urban, and we have been assured that we shall be 43 percent urban by the year 2015-just a little over ten years from now. So it's a reality we cannot run away from, and we have to see it within the context of globalisation. Globalisation is a very over-used word, but I remind you that when we went to the slum area of Kolkata yesterday there was a family there with an antenna-they were seeing what is happening everywhere. They have become in a sense part of the global population.

The increased level of our global connection means that we are all being forced to engage in social learning. We are learning from each other so that we can sustain our stake on this earth. And it is within that context that I want to put the way that we are looking at this problem at the African end. There are three questions that came to my mind when I was asked to talk on this topic of sustainable partnerships for city development. My first question is-who are the partners? My second question is-what have municipalities done with these partners? How have municipalities accepted them in the city and how have they been relating to them? My third question is-what can we do, or what are we even thinking about starting to do, in Africa, with regard to making these partnerships more sustainable?

If we think about all the partners-whether it's the private sector, whether it's the agency of civil society like NGOs, whether it's the poor-it seems that the city hasn't really learnt how to establish a sustainable relationship with them. But I want to talk about the most important partner that the city has to deal with-the poor. The truth is that the poor are increasingly becoming the majority of city dwellers. Somebody has described the poor as the zero-plus people. You can either treat them as zero or treat them as plus. You can either ignore them-that's treating them as zero, or help them to make the city the place that motivated them to come. Because when I look at the poor I ask myself who are they? They are people with a lot of hope, with a lot of determination when they move into the city. They have a lot of energy. They are young men and women, ready to work if you find the work for them, and when we don't find it they even create work themselves. In most of our countries the most extensive economic activity is that within the informal sector. And yet we still sometimes treat all this activity as if it doesn't exist. We don't even record what the informal sector is doing. But we could treat it as the plus in which case we start learning about it and what to do with it.

But the more serious point I want to leave with all of you is that these people, the urban poor, are in their reproductive age. They are going to be giving you children that you can't believe. The city is going to be the scene tomorrow, and the people who will give you its population, which will be over 50 percent of the global population in no time, are already in the city. One of their major problems is what shelter do they have over their heads. In this area we have a big challenge to face. The poor create shanty towns-they create slums. In Lagos we are already 13 million and somebody went around looking at how many slums we've generated, and he said that we've already got about 53 slum areas in Lagos. So if that is what our major partner does how have the cities been responding to them?

Let me talk about Lagos. Our first reaction was to say "Good God-just scrub them out." In fact we make a joke about cities without slums which is you mean we should keep on wiping them out. Well that's not what works-not slum clearance, because when we clear them from one area they just appear in another or four other areas. We soon learnt the futility of doing that. And then we tried the next one which is to try to prevent them landing at all-to harass them, get the police to keep throwing them out-evict them. But they are cleverer than we are.

Sometimes they come back at night because they want to be in the city. They want to be part of whatever the city is doing. So our second strategy of harassment became futile. Then we tried the third one-you know-see no evil, hear no evil, think no evil. We just assume that they don't exist except that they mess up our streets, they mess up our gardens, they mess up everything. You can't ignore them. And the fourth reaction that we are starting to learn is-OK accept them. But then what do we do because the poor are not just partners in urbanisation-they are in fact the challenge of urbanisation. There is no point deceiving ourselves. They will keep coming and you have to learn to deal with them. They are more than partners-they are your challenge. When you succeed in meeting that challenge you will have successful urbanisation.

So how do you deal with this partnership? We are starting to learn in Africa. One of the first things we are learning is to take the whole city-to look at the whole magnitude of your problem. It's not enough to just deal with little groups here and little groups there. When you take the whole city you have to change your strategy. You don't have the resources to deal with all of the poor-project by project and therefore you have to think of a new strategy of building on the plus that the poor can represent. What happens is that you start to plan how to provoke them, as communities, to start doing things for themselves. And all the experience we have in Africa indicates that they are ready, to be active and creative if the right kind of support and guidance is available. Strategies can vary from country to country, from city to city, but we are starting to see that there are some basic elements that can make a difference, that can start changing the face of the slum.

The World Bank and UNCHS have come up with secure tenure. The point to remember about secure tenure is that what you don't own you don't value, and by creating a sense of ownership, even if it's of a small patch, you start people on a process of valuing their being in the city. The women- they're fantastic about mobilisation. Everywhere we've been. In my country if you move with the women you are likely to succeed.

We are starting to understand the infrastructure that is needed-water, sanitation, paved areas and so on. Micro-credit is important, and we are beginning to recognise the importance of savings-they love to save; it's amazing. Just make it possible for them to have something and they'll start saving. But the issue is sustainability. They are not cases of charity. Each time you start charity it won't last. Just reassure yourself. In my country we have a proverb that a gift that you don't pay for you leave at the back of the port-it doesn't matter. So whatever we do we have to start from the beginning to encourage them that services are meant to be paid for.

We must now see slum upgrading as a programme of the city, not as a discrete project to be done in one little area. And that city focus immediately changes the programme of international and bilateral assistance that is needed. The municipality must provide support and assistance as part of an incentive package. Once communities are mobilised they have to be encouraged. Even if it's a matching grant or when you've done this you can have that-but there must be some healthy competitive relationship between the slum groups. Because they want to change and the municipality must accept that the slums are its greatest challenge. So the incentive package must be one that makes them want to help themselves, and it is that incentive package that multilateral and bilateral agencies must increasingly buy into because a single project absorbs so much energy that when you've finished you want to declare victory and go home. But the single project is not replicable unless somebody else goes and finds another bilateral to do another slum.

I want to leave us with the appreciation that the urban situation in the world is going to be a challenge everywhere because more than half the population has come there, and they will be zero-plus people. They will come in as poor people, but they don't want to live in poverty, so we must help them to rise in the world because they are willing to change the circumstances of their lives. So our challenge is to design programmes and strategies of working with them.

The word city has the same root as the word citizen-and of course comes from the same culture that created the notion of democracy. When you ignore the poor you are denying their citizenship. When they are in the city with you and you are helping them you are making them truly citizens. Each time I walk with the poor I remember a quotation, I think from Euclid, that says: "give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." When you give the poor a place where they can stand, you will be surprised at what they will move.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

The Future of India's Cities

By Richard Florida

Richard Florida, author of The Flight of the Creative Class and the Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, believes that cities must find new ways of attracting bright and creative minds if they are to succeed. The following is an excerpt from an article which appeared on the Times of India website on February 18, 2006.

If the recent meeting of world leaders at Davos is any indication, India is rapidly becoming an economic 'rock star'. If China is the world's factory, India has become the world's outsourcing centre.
. . .

But India's future depends crucially on its ability to compete fully in the Creative Economy-not just in tech and software, but across design and entrepreneurship; arts, culture and entertainment; and the knowledge-based professions of medicine, finance and law.

While its creative assets outstrip those of China and other emerging competitors, India must address several challenges to increase its international competitiveness.
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The world is in the midst of a sweeping transformation, from an industrial economy to a Creative Economy that generates wealth by harnessing intellectual labour, intangible goods and human creative capabilities.

India is well-positioned to compete. Bollywood, which makes over 900 films a year, is the world's largest filmmaking centre. India's creative talent has already made its mark on the global entertainment industry and popular culture. The music scenes of London, Toronto, and New York are infused with Bhangra beats.

Elsewhere too, India excels. Its video game industry is projected to grow tenfold, to $300 million, by decade-end, and its animation industry from $300 million to almost a billion dollars by 2009.

Its advertising, graphic design and product design industries are seeing extraordinary growth. Longstanding strength in health care is attracting significant investments in medical technologies and pharmaceuticals.
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But India also faces substantial challenges. It ranks 41st of 45 countries on my Global Creativity Index, an aggregate measure of its strength across the 3Ts of economic development.

India does well on the first T, Technology, ranking 23rd world-wide. But, despite its globally renowned IITs, it ranks 44th on the second T, Talent, with only 6 percent of its population holding a Bachelor's degree.

It ranks 39th on the third T, Tolerance-openness to self-expression and a wide range of social groups. To compete and win in the creative age, India will have to become a magnet for talent from around the world.

But India's biggest challenge goes deeper and is embedded in the very logic of the global Creative Economy. Innovation and economic growth are more concentrated than ever.

India's growth is premised on the success of a handful of regions. Virtually all significant technological innovations produced in India in 2004 (those for which US patents were granted) came from just three city-regions-Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi.

Outside of these and several other creative centres, large sections of India's population live a hand-to-mouth existence.

Still, there is a great tradition of creativity to build on; creativity, it seems, is part of India's DNA. India has long valued the development of talent across multiple dimensions, from literature and the arts to medicine, engineering and entrepreneurship.

Its internal diversity-religious, cultural, political, and geographic-along with a tolerance of dissent and openness to outside influence and trade have provided this ecosystem with a constant influx of new ideas and people.

Now, India needs to find ways to harness the full creative capability of its inhabitants across all industries, occupations, classes, and geographic regions.

To do so would give India an undeniable advantage in the global Creative Economy and provide the world with a large-scale model for how development of human capabilities is the most effective route to true economic development.

Excerpted from the article "Let's Get Creative" by Richard Florida with assistance of Jesse Elliott. Article first published in The Times of India. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Meeting With the Urban Poor

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. He has acted as economic advisor to governments around the world. The following is an excerpt from his bestselling book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.

An impoverished community in Mumbai, India, struggles with the urban face of extreme poverty. A group that I met in June 2004 comes from a community that lives near the railway tracks. By near, I do not mean within range of the railway whistle as the train rolls through the city: I mean a community that lives within ten feet of the tracks. It may seem impossible, but the shacks of poster board, corrugated sheet metal, thatch, and whatever else is at hand are pushed right against the tracks . . . Children and the old routinely walk along the tracks, often within a foot or two of passing trains. They defecate on the tracks, for lack of alternative sanitation. And they are routinely maimed and killed by the trains.

An energetic and charismatic social worker, Sheela Patel, who left academic research years earlier to work with communities like this one, has brought me to meet the group. She has pioneered the cause of community organization within the very poorest slums . . . The NGO that she founded, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), is our host today. The fifty or so people assembled around the room are mostly women in their thirties and forties, but they look much older after decades of hard physical work and exposure to the elements. They have come to meet with me, and also a group of visitors from Durban, South Africa, who are there to learn about community organization from slum dwellers and squatters.

The overarching theme of our discussion is not latrines, running water, and safety from the trains, but empowerment: specifically, the group is discussing how slum dwellers who own virtually nothing have found a voice, a strategy for negotiating with the city government. In the past few years, this particular group, with SPARC's support, has been negotiating arrangements to relocate away from the tracks to safer ground, in settlements with basic amenities like running water, latrines, gutters, even roads. Thousands have already been relocated, though thousands more wait to find new living quarters.

The notion of large communities of people living within a few feet of the train tracks is startling enough for me this morning. It is, to be sure, a measure of the desperation of the poorest of the poor who arrive in cities to escape rural impoverishment, even famine, and then struggle to establish survivable conditions for themselves and for their children. But I'm even more startled to learn that there is actually a Railway Slum Dwellers Federation (RSDF), which has been organized by the community members, with the aid of SPARC, to negotiate with the municipality and the Indian Railways concerning their needs and interests. In addition to SPARC and the RSDF, a third NGO is represented at the meeting, Mahila Milan (Women Together), which focuses specifically on the needs of women slum dwellers.

As the women begin to talk, the realities of extreme urban poverty and the range of solutions come vividly to the fore. Each woman begins with a kind of testimonial to the power of group action. This testimony might have seemed staged but for the genuine smiles, calm demeanor, and straight-forward, matter-of-fact approach of the group. They explain how they have had no schooling-perhaps two or three years of fitful attendance several decades ago. They cannot read or write, but they know full well that their children need and deserve better. Before they came together in the joint initiative of SPARC, the RSDF, and Mahila Milan, they were resigned in their dreadful circumstances, living in constant danger, noise, disruption and squalor.

But group action has taught them that in fact they have legal rights within the city and even the possibility of access to public services if they act together. The city government and Indian Railways, for their part, have been only too happy to try to relocate the group away from the railway tracks, since the presence of the slum right up against the tracks leads to frequent accidents and forces the trains to slow down markedly, raising costs and limiting service. The city and the railway company have learned the hard way that any forcible actions to relocate individual families can trigger an uproar, as occurred in February 2001 when two thousand huts were demolished along the Harbour railway line and the federation mobilized its members to shut down the city's railways.

. . . What this community needs are investments in individuals and basic infrastructure that can empower people to be healthier, better educated, and more productive in the workforce. These impoverished families want basic amenities-to live away from the railway tracks, with access to water, sanitation, roads and even electricity. They will need to have new ration cards for the government-supplied subsidized food and cooking oil in the new neighborhoods where they will live. Their children will need access to a school and clinic. They would like to be able to reach their jobs on public transport or on foot if they are close enough. All are hard workers, earning their meager incomes as maids, cooks, sweepers guards, launderers, or in other low-skilled labor-intensive services. The younger and more literate members of the group have actually begun to gain, or regain, basic literacy, empowered and liberated by their political activism. Those who become literate have a chance to find work at two or three times their current salaries, perhaps in the garment factories.

One recent report from the slums of Mumbai and Pune, India, speaks plainly as to how the lack of basic infrastructure, in this case clean drinking water, has devastating consequences on the dignity and physical well-being of women:

"It is typically women who collect water from public standpipes, often queuing for long periods in the process and having to get up very early or go late at night to get the water. It is typically women who have to carry heavy water containers over long distances and on slippery slopes. It is typically women who have to make do with the often inadequate water supplies to clean the home, prepare the food, wash the utensils, do the laundry and bathe the children. It is also women who have to scrounge, buy or beg for water, particularly when the usual sources run dry. It is important not to underestimate this side of the water burden. There are no compelling international statistics, comparable to health statistics, documenting the labour burdens related to inadequate water provision. It is difficult for those who have never had to rely on public or other people's taps to appreciate how humiliating, tiring, stressful and inconvenient this can be. Not having toilets, or having to wait in long queues to use filthy toilets, carries health risks and is a source of anxiety."

In many ways, the logistical and investment needs of the squatters will be easier to address than the comparable needs of [villagers]. Water taps can be provided from the main city pipes. Electricity can be tapped into from the power grid rather than supplied by a stand-alone generator. In densely populated urban areas, access to schools and clinics can also be easier to arrange. Doctors and nurses abound in Mumbai in comparison with the scarcity of trained medical personnel in rural [areas]. The problems in urban areas revolve around empowerment and finance. How can an impoverished squatter community, without its own land, find a collective voice and how can the financial burdens be shared among the city government and the slum dwellers in a realistic manner?

With SPARC's initiative, the new Slum Rehabilitation Act has given added power to the communities: slum-dweller organizations are now legally empowered to act as land developers if they can demonstrate that they have agreements to represent at least 70 percent of the eligible slum dwellers in a particular location. As land developers, the slum-dweller organizations can tap into special municipal programs to gain access to real estate for community resettlement or for commercial development that can finance resettlement elsewhere. SPARC is also negotiating with the Kolkata Municipal Authority to help set up lavatories in Kolkata's slums, under an arrangement in which the costs of construction would be borne jointly by the municipality and the slum dwellers, and maintenance would be the responsibility of the slum dwellers' organization.

As Sheela Patel explains, adding an organized slum dwellers' voice at the table will make possible future solutions that were undreamed of in the past. Recently the World Bank has creatively joined the mix, helping to finance some of the upgrading of Mumbai's urban transport based on a major role for the NGOs in the design and implementation of the resettlement programs. The NGOs, for their part, have made important advances in organizing and documenting the community members to facilitate the process. Sheela Patel and her colleagues have said that these programs are "steps on the journey towards citizenship for the urban poor, where rights are translated into reality because of the favorable confluence of a supportive policy environment and grassroots democracy in action."

Extracted from The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Copyright © Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2005. Published by the Penguin Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Mobilizing the Slums

By Sheela PatelSheela Patel is director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), a non-profit organization working on issues of equity and social justice in Mumbai, India. SPARC works in alliance with the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) and Mahila Milan, a women's organization. The following is an abbreviated version of her May 2004 paper "Tools and Methods for Empowerment Developed by Slum Dwellers Federations in India."

The conventional way in which NGOs seek to change governments is through policy advocacy. They generally base this on consultations with communities and draw from these consultations to suggest alternative policies to government which they campaign to have accepted. Often, the policies suggested are good and much needed but these rarely influence government policy. Even when they do, most communities lack the training, exposure or capacity to take advantage of them.

The NSDF/Mahila Milan/SPARC Alliance decided to set precedents and using these precedents to negotiate for changes in policies and practices. Precedent setting begins by recognizing that the strategies used by the poor are probably the most effective starting point although they may need to be improved. Precedents are set as the Alliance supports community organizations to try out pilot projects and then to refine and develop them. Because they emerge from the poor's existing practices, they make sense to other grassroots organizations, become widely supported and can easily be scaled up. But these precedents often contravene official rules and standards. For instance, the Alliance promoted the use of a mezzanine floor in the design of houses because this provides households with more room and flexibility in their homes but costs much less than a two-storey unit. Government designs did not allow this. So the Federation demonstrated what could be done (and how well it worked) before negotiating its approval. Now this design is being built in a new housing development for pavement dwellers.

Precedent setting with community toilets

One of the Alliance's largest initiatives is the design, construction and management of community toilets. Many 'slums' in Indian cities had government designed, contractor-built public toilets that did not work well because of poor designs, poor quality construction and lack of maintenance. New designs for community toilets were developed and built and used as learning experiences both for those who built them and for those who visited them (through community exchanges). They incorporated many features that made them work better including separate toilets and queues for men and women (in standard government designs with only one queue, men often jump the queue) and measures to ensure water was always available (for instance having large reservoir tanks to draw on when main supplies were down). The new toilet block designs also included accommodation for a caretaker and often space for community-meeting places (if communities meet regularly within the toilet complex, it also brings pressure to ensure it is kept clean). These new toilet blocks cost the government less than the poor-quality contractor built toilets, which led to government support for hundreds of community toilet blocks in Mumbai and Pune that now serve hundreds of thousands of households. The federation is also advising various other city authorities in India on implementing large-scale community toilet programmes.

Why did the federation begin work on community toilets?

To bring communities together. A toilet project is small enough to be planned and built within a small budget and time frame but large enough to start many things happening, including involving women, allowing people to work together, tapping skills in the community to manage money and, finally, allowing people to enjoy defecating in private. If you have squatted along an open drain all your life, it is hard to imagine toilets being clean places. If they are clean and well-cared for, they become points of congregation. The next step is the realization that slums do not have to be dirty places, but can be beautiful communities in which to live.

To test new pro-poor policies. Given the lack of provision for sanitation in cities, this was an important chance to advocate for and test new pro-poor policies.

To expand livelihood options. The construction and management of toilet blocks expanded the livelihood options of poor people and developed their skills.

To expand the federation. Most of the 'slums' in which community toilets were built were non-federated. Working in these areas greatly expanded the federation's base and trained them to work in different settings.

To strengthen the relationship with municipal authorities. Municipal authorities have learned much about developing minimum sanitation from the community toilet blocks. The traditional relationship of politicians as patrons and voters as clients also underwent a transformation. Whereas previously, a toilet block was a political "gift", now citizens saw toilet blocks as their right. Their involvement in designing, building and maintaining each toilet block built their strength and confidence to negotiate with local municipal officials on other issues. The culture of silence and subservience begins to give way to a more substantively democratic process.

Changing national policies. The Alliance also seeks to change attitudes and policies at the national level. The Indian government has introduced a new programme where a 50 percent subsidy for the construction of community toilets is available to local bodies and public authorities.

Adding to the repertoire of the poor. The community toilet-building programme encouraged hundreds of communities to undertake projects and to create an environment that makes room for experimentation. Externally supported interventions like this do not set new standards, but alter and influence the circumstances that allow communities to develop standards of their own.

Making room for communities to learn by experimenting and by making mistakes. Learning for any individual generally means having to do something more than once and making mistakes before finally getting it right. Built into many community participation programmes is "only one chance" which does not allow the learning and training capital produced by mistakes to be reinvested in new processes. It stops participation at the first sign of error. Poor communities are unable to experiment because they have no margin within their limited resources to absorb mistakes. This is one of the crises of poverty, and this is why these toilet projects make room for, and even encourage, mistakes.

People on the move: training others and breaking isolation. People in communities that have built their own toilets are the best teachers for others interested in doing the same. Their experience can give a head start to other communities. For skills to be refined and spread around, it is important that as many people as possible visit the toilets, participate in their building, and return to their own settlements filled with new ideas.

Each new toilet that is built is better than the last one. Each time it gets easier, the "circle of preparation" shrinks and the number of people able and willing to get things done grows considerably . . . all these projects involved an external intervention-somebody coming in from the outside, shaking things up, asking questions, posing challenges, and intentionally pushing forward what is required . . .

Don't wait for ideal conditions. None of these toilet blocks are perfect. Most were built under circumstances that could be considered impossible. But every toilet block represents a vital investment in learning and human capacity. These are the building blocks of large-scale change, much more than perfect designs or innovative engineering.

Start with sanitation rather than land tenure. City government and civil society can easily see the relationship between the sanitation needs of the poor and their own health and well-being. The demands for sanitation by urban poor organizations is less threatening than demands for land or for land tenure. Of all the basic services that the poor have begun to demand, sanitation has begun to be less contested than others. This is especially so when the sensibilities of middle-class citizens are affected by seeing people defecate in the open. It takes longer to make the connection between housing and the sense of security that the urban poor need for their well-being and quality of life.

Why the poor make good sanitation partners. Providing basic services to any large city is always a vast field of shared responsibility. At the edge of this field of decisions are all the people who need water taps and toilets. It has been assumed that these people, particularly the poor, cannot be involved in infrastructure decisions because they lack the necessary technical expertise. But the technicalities of toilets, water supply and sewerage are not beyond them. Poor people can analyze their own sanitation needs. They can plan, construct and maintain their own toilets. And they can own the process.

Developing standards that are realistic for and work for poor communities. When city governments build toilet blocks, they use the same old standard designs-expensive, difficult to maintain and mostly doomed to deteriorate rapidly and become unusable. Fresh, workable standards for community improvement are badly needed but they can only emerge from a reality which poor people understand better than bureaucrats, and can only be developed through practice.

The distinction between public toilets and community toilets. Public toilets serve the needs of whoever happens to be passing. A community toilet belongs to and is controlled by a community-not a government or a passing stranger. To build a community toilet is to acknowledge that a community exists, and that inside that community live women, men and children who have legitimate needs. Within the murky politics of land and land tenure in Indian cities, the construction of a community toilet can be a powerful manoeuvre.

Why community toilets rather than individual toilets? Because they can provide everyone, even the poorest, with sanitation. Those who are better-off can, and will, gradually build individual facilities for themselves.

Why community-managed and controlled? Because the toilet blocks produce a possibility of change that helps develop new leaders, new relationships within communities and new relationships with external agencies. Possibilities for communities to conceptualize, design and manage vital assets become visible and this, in turn, raises the possibility of the poor, and women in particular, being able to participate in an exploration of new roles with their communities.

Why community construction? With some assistance, this is something anyone can do. Community involvement in design and construction provides insights into maintenance needs. But the most important aspect is to do with linking livelihoods and producing entrepreneurial behaviour among the poor. Most slum people face barriers to getting better paid jobs. By taking the opportunity to become contractors for toilet blocks (sometimes as individuals and sometimes as collectives), they develop new skills.

Start small and keep pressing. Starting with small initiatives can show both government and communities that change is possible. Convince officials that they can use their limited powers to make a little change. First, they might only give limited consent. Later, consent might become support. Support is the first step in the creation of a genuine partnership.

Know more than they do. When community organizations enter into negotiations with governments or other external agencies well-prepared with enumeration reports that have data on all households in the settlement, with toilet construction or upgrading or new house costs worked out and tested, with knowledge of city infrastructure grids, and with examples of community-state partnerships in other cities, it becomes harder for government or aid agency officials to argue against their proposals.

Learning to negotiate. Arriving at long-term solutions requires communities to negotiate with city and state governments and other groups. Often municipalities, state institutions, and even developmental organizations do not know how to work with poor communities to arrive at solutions. The usual approach is for external agencies to get communities to 'do something' which they believe poor people need to do. All the tools and methods described here are meant to change this, to create a more equal relationship between poor communities and external agencies in identifying problems and developing solutions. They are also meant to support poor communities in demonstrating the competence, capacity and resources they can bring to this. And they are meant to constantly remind the staff of external agencies that they should be supporting local processes that communities need to own. For most international agencies, this implies modifying their conventional project cycles so they support the kinds of long-term processes described above. This also means not imposing unrealistic demands for the achievement of short-term goals that so often undermine the long-term processes that can produce real poverty reduction.

Reprinted by permission of the author. Full version.

The Mystery of Capital

By Hernando de Soto

Hernando de Soto is President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru, which "focuses on creating modern legal frameworks that empower the poor of the developing and ex-communist world by providing them with a new, comprehensive legal property system . . . ." Mr. de Soto's views are outlined in two books: The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else and The Other Path. The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to The Mystery of Capital.

The cities of the Third World and the former communist countries are teeming with entrepreneurs. You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern market, hike up to a Latin American village, or climb into a taxicab in Moscow without someone trying to make a deal with you. The inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm, and an astonishing ability to wring a profit out of practically nothing. They can grasp and use modern technology. Otherwise, Americans would not be struggling to control the unauthorized use of their patents abroad, nor would the U.S. government be striving so desperately to keep modern weapons technology out of the hands of Third World countries. Markets are an ancient universal tradition: Christ drove the merchants out of the temple two thousand years ago, and Mexicans were taking their products to market long before Columbus reached America.

But if people in countries making the transition to capitalism are not pitiful beggars, are not helplessly trapped in obsolete ways, and are not the uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional cultures, what is it that prevents capitalism from delivering to them the same wealth it has delivered to the West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a bell jar?

. . . The major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.

. . . The facts and figures that my research team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America [show] that most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense-forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much of the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the total assets of all the poor are more than one hundred fifty times greater than all the foreign investment received since Haiti's independence from France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations-0.7 percent of national income-it would take the richest country on earth more than 150 years to transfer to the world's poor resources equal to those they already possess.

But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of the narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment.

In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representation process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them general capital.

Third World and former communist nations do not have this representational process. As a result, most of them are undercapitalized, in the same way that a firm is undercapitalized when it issues fewer securities than its income and assets would justify. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investment and finance. Without representation, their assets are dead capital.

The poor inhabitants of these nations-five-sixths of humanity-do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work.

From the book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto; Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.

The Transformation of Pretoria to Tshwane

By Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa

Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, President of United Cities and Local Governments of Africa (UCLGA), played a crucial role in the transition of the Pretoria area of South Africa to black rule at the municipal level before stepping down as mayor of the new municipality of Tshwane this year. The following is an edited version of his State of the City Address, which he made in his outgoing speech.

In 2000 we inherited a city divided along racial and geographic lines, but we rose to the challenge by seamlessly integrating the east and west and north and south into one city-a single municipality of black and white and rich and poor united in the common objective of creating a city comparable to the leading capital cities of the world.

The inculcation of a common identity among the people of Tshwane is an achievement often overlooked because it is not as tangible as water and houses. But in the context of a one time Greater Pretoria, whose claim to infamy was once racial division, this is probably the first in a line of achievements which have transformed this city into a place where we can make and bring up our families.

Black and white children are schooled and play together, while their parents work, do business and play golf together in a way which must be having HF Verwoerd squirming in his grave. Many business leaders and captains of industry I have met, particularly among the white community, assure me that the past five years have been their best years in Tshwane, both from business and residential points of view. Our universities, schools, churches, mosques and public transport continue to unite us into a truly cosmopolitan city of the twenty first century, and our neighbourhoods continue to be non racial as our city becomes demographically, socially, economically and culturally inclusive.

It is only where particular sports codes and events-such as soccer, rugby and Cars in the Park-as well as national commemorations-such as Women's Day and Freedom Day-are concerned that we continue to be divided into black and white, when in actual fact sport should unite us.

. . . We have maintained the solid infrastructure that our formerly advantaged areas enjoyed while progressively improving the almost dilapidated infrastructure we inherited in the previously disadvantaged areas. Our former whites only areas, in particular, have experienced even better development not only with their roads, public lighting, water supply and stormwater systems well maintained and even upgraded, but they have also been provided with free basic amounts of water and electricity, and they have generally experienced new quality housing, health, retail and educational infrastructural developments in their areas . . .

Tshwane, consequently, has become one of the most sought after residential areas in the country, with many people opting to commute to workplaces up to a hundred kilometres from our city just so that they can enjoy the unique residential, educational, health and recreational experiences and quality of life offered by Tshwane.

In a period of five years our total capital investment was equitably distributed between the First and Second Economies . . . we have not let our previously advantaged areas fall into disrepair while building up, often from scratch, the formerly disadvantaged parts of the city.

Five years ago we promised to supply all households in Tshwane with a given amount of free electricity. Today all houses on the electricity grid . . . receive their quota of free electricity. The same applies to water. In 2000 we committed ourselves to supplying all households in Tshwane with 6 free kilolitres of water per household per month.

Thanks to our remarkable roll out of bulk water supply infrastructure in the past five years, many of our remaining challenges on the water and sanitation front relate to the more manageable house to house connections, meaning that, indeed, 2010 will find Tshwane with affordable water everywhere. The bucket system will be history by 2007.

Since 2000 Tshwane has provided 110,000 housing opportunities for our communities . . . Furthermore, 80,000 title deeds were issued to residents who had been denied property rights in urban areas.

Our policy of allowing private developers to rehabilitate dormant housing and office blocks in the city to create rental housing units has not only resulted in affordable housing within our city, but it has also regenerated and gentrified some parts of the city which were going to rack and ruin. No economically resourced person should be without a decent roof over his or her head in Tshwane . . .

In a city where the people's lives are progressively getting better we should all say, in partnership with the Mozambican poet, Marcelino dos Santos,

Our land is open to the frank embrace of hope

. . . All our strategies will be developed with the participation of our communities as our legislation so pronounces . . . We have introduced community development workers whose role is to inform people about government services and mechanisms to access them.

. . . Together with the empowerment of our people with information on their rights and expectations from their municipality, should be the empowerment of municipal officials and councillors with the requisite skills to deliver effectively on the developmental mandate . . .

Our development of a culture of mass participation must be fashioned on the principle of targeting, which we have already implemented through the Youth and Women's Assemblies, both of which we convened in the past year to focus on the needs, concerns and ideas of those sectors of our society . . . we must take this process further by ensuring that all our work as a municipality also contributes to the development and empowerment of young people and women. . . . In terms of primary health care, we offer free services through 23 clinics and 3 satellites . . .

We shall, before the year end, hold a Summit for Growth and Development where the social partners of government, business, labour and community organisations will be invited to announce practical actions they will undertake to contribute to local economic development.

. . . In 1996 the city's exports represented only 5 percent of the country's exports, by 2001 they had grown to 9 percent... While the country's unemployment rate in 2004 stood at 41.6 percent and the Gauteng province's at 36.4 percent, our city's was 27.3 percent. While the national weighted average income in 2004 was 74,700 rand per annum and the province's 82,900 rand, ours was an impressive 96,500 rand. Educationally, 24.6 percent of our people have primary education, 49.6 percent secondary education, and 16.9 percent tertiary education . . .

. . . Coupled with an improvement in the economic well being of our people is the improvement of parks and sports facilities in previously neglected areas of the city . . .

On the safety and security front, closed circuit TV cameras installed in the inner city have contributed to a 27 percent decrease in crime. We are in the process of extending the project to other regions of Tshwane, and our Metro Police are continually reviewing their strategies to respond to new challenges.

Our recent introduction of the Tshwane Transport Authority, which should, through consultation, lead to the better management and regulation of the public transport system of buses and taxis in Tshwane, will make our city even more attractive as a residential, work, investment and entertainment destination.

I invite all of you, irrespective of your political affiliation, to make a practical, positive and meaningful contribution to the policies and actions meant to realise the vision I have sketched. We all live and work here, and what becomes of Tshwane affects us all, and so in the second decade of our democracy, and the second phase of our developmental local government system, let us rise above the prejudice imposed upon us by the past and contribute to our country's Age of Hope . . .

Reprinted by permission of the author. Full speech.

Housing the Poor: Lessons from Toronto

By Jane Jacobs

The lateJane Jacobs was the champion of neighbourhoods, believing that planners have too often tried to create artificial urban landscapes to the detriment of the evolution of natural mixed neighbourhoods. A transplanted American who lived her later years in Toronto, she wrote the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In her last book, Dark Age Ahead, she argues that decentralization is as important in rich countries as it is in poor countries.

Between 1996 and 2002, Toronto suffered a net loss of 17,515 rental housing units, mostly to developers who can make big profits by building and marketing condominiums. Only the few richest households can afford the many fewer apartments or houses for rent, particularly those built before the Second World War, which theoretically should be trickling down to the poor, but which are desirable and costly after renovation and are located in the mostly lively and interesting neighbourhoods. Against the massive losses of rental units, only seventy-four (yes, 74) subsidized apartments affordable by low-wage earners, single-income families, disabled persons, and others on welfare have been added to the city's housing stock in more than a decade. Building this pittance required nine years of strenuous and devoted effort on the part of a band of community volunteers; among many barriers they surmounted was a development tax of more than $1,200 per apartment, extorted to anticipate public schooling costs of tenants' children.

. . . Assisted-housing policies, designs and management had become unpopular with both tenants and taxpayers and, like public housing in the United States, had been drastically curtailed in Canada. However, owing to the good fortune of a clever, courageous, and popular mayor, David Crombie; a housing commissioner, Michael Dennis, who was a genius at cutting red tape; creative architects; and strong citizen support, Toronto managed to win independence from the province for planning and design of assisted housing in 1972. It also extricated itself from the federal government's red tape.

The city used its new responsibilities to build on very small, scattered sites. Architecturally the buildings varied, depending on existing surroundings; on streets with grand old Victorian houses, the infilled assisted housing sported cone-topped turrets and bay windows. Dreary vacant lots were knit back into lively city fabric. The new policies were economical because small sites were unattractive to competing developers with deep pockets; yet small sites added up as they were built upon by cooperatives, public bodies, and other nonprofit builders. No longer was new assisted housing set apart from the normal city, nor its residents stigmatized as project dwellers. If their incomes rose, they tended to stay by choice, making it feasible to raise rents when tenants' incomes rose, which released money to augment further infilling.

For twenty years, Toronto built assisted housing in this fashion, incorporating many constructive innovations in addition to the few I've mentioned. The program was popular with both taxpayers and residents, yet it was felled by one-size-fits-all bureaucracy. When the federal and provincial governments halted grants for assisted housing, Toronto's resources for it were cut off, too. Instead of learning from innovations and encouraging them to spread, the senior governments killed them. Death to innovation is death to economic and social development.

When I go to our neighbourhood shopping street, I am asked by a well-spoken, shabbily dressed man of late middle age to write that he and others in his fix need rooming houses, but rooming houses are gone. "Please tell it, spread the word," he says. I promise I will; he thanks me, and I don't have the heart to tell him that spreading the word does no good.

Extracted from Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs. Copyright © 2004 Jane Jacobs. Reprinted by permission of Random House Canada.

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Urban Success Stories

Self-Help Housing in the Slums of South Africa

The empowerment of a South African community began with the death of a small girl.

In 1999, a flash summer flood swept through a squatter community in Ivory Park Township, located in a river valley between Pretoria and Johannesburg. The river that ran through the community spilled over its banks and flushed hundreds of shacks off their moorings of stones and tires.

The flood scattered walls and roofs made of scrap cardboard and polyethylene and rusted corrugated metal wherever it chose to dump them. And it swept a 3-year-old girl to her death. That was enough for Anna Mofokeng. A mother of two boys, she had lived in the shantytown for eight years. Mofokeng had gone to the funeral for the drowned child, heard the politicians and administrators bemoan the little girl's fate, and knew in her heart that if change was going to come, the community would have to be involved.

Previously, the apartheidera authorities had caused the inhabitants of Ivory Park more problems than they had ever solved, raiding the settlement to try to demolish it over and over again. The squatters showed plenty of innovation in response, building their shacks in such a way that they could easily be taken down and set up again whenever the government tried to clear them away. But it was a zero-sum game.

Anna Mofokeng decided that this innovative spirit could be harnessed in the new South Africa and turned into something that would last. She challenged neighbouring women to put aside 20 rand a week- equivalent to the cost of a loaf of bread a day. They would start a savings society, and one by one the shacks, starting with the poorest, would be replaced by modest, permanent dwellings that would not wash away. The money raised would be used to buy the building materials. The total collected would be awarded to a different woman each week, the recipient being the one living in the poorest shack. Members would pitch in to build each modest house, virtually eliminating labour costs.

Only six people joined the first week. Initially, there was a sense that it was ridiculous to believe that houses could be created out of a loaf of bread a day-bread that was needed to feed hungry children. Mofokeng was even accused of trying to set up a pyramid scheme. Such was the inauspicious birth of the Masisizane Women's Housing Cooperative (masisizane means "help one another" in Zulu).

The first house the women built had to be knocked down and started again. A government inspector said it would crack and fall down. "It looked fine to us. But the man showed us what we had done wrong," Mofokeng later told a reporter. "We were so angry ... we had to destroy the building and start over. But, I'll tell you what, we never made those mistakes again."

By 2001, the Women's Co-op had built 18 homes without any government assistance. An article in the Christian Science Monitor described the process:

"Singing as they work, the women- without much in the way of tools or training-do everything from laying a foundation to putting on the roof. They hire sympathetic local men at reduced rates for the more technical plumbing work and plastering, bringing the cost of a new home down to between $1,000 and $2,000."

Up to that point, the new South African government had little engagement with community self-help groups, but that thinking was beginning to change. Attempts to eradicate squatter communities were abandoned. Consideration was even being given to subsidizing self-help groups that could prove they were effective. There were between two and three million homeless people in South Africa, and the government finally recognized that it did not have the resources to solve the problem on its own.

Launching "Project Hope"-designed to develop a spirit of volunteerism among South Africans-former president Nelson Mandela declared in the fall of 2001: "We do need a vibrant network and range of civil society activities and organs if we are to permanently cement the foundations of our democracy."

Following the Christian Science Monitor article, the South African government worked with Mofokeng to start similar self-help groups throughout Johannesburg's many squatter camps. By the time of her death in the fall of 2003, she had helped to found many groups operating on the Masisizane model and was still adamant that she could convert South Africa's acres of tin shacks into proud neighbourhoods.

Rooftops Canada, a Canadian non-governmental organization (NGO) with experience in cooperative housing, had become involved the year before, with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Andrew Moore, a technical advisor with Rooftops Canada, recalls Mofokeng's last weeks:

"She had TB as well as AIDS, so she had a debilitating cough. She had collapsed and been taken to the hospital and diagnosed with AIDS, but she wouldn't stop. Right up until the last few days I would drive her around in my car to do site visits to check progress-the project had just received subsidies for 250 houses from the province. She was very pleased that we had pulled off this major funding and had started going in a new direction. At her funeral, there was a sign over her coffin: Anna 'Iron Woman' Mofokeng."
By the time Mofokeng died, the Masisizane Cooperative had swollen to 4,800 members and had built more than 400 houses.

Rooftops Canada involvement was triggered by a request for assistance from Masisizane to access the new subsidies that the South African government was offering for self-help housing. The Canadian NGO came onto the scene at the right time, because after the death of the charismatic Mofokeng, there was a void that threatened the project's future.

While Rooftops Canada could not fill that void, it did offer good advice, suggesting that the cooperative go beyond thinking about mere survival and thinking instead about expanding its horizons. With technical support from Rooftops Canada and government training subsidies for local construction workers made available, the cooperative moved beyond self-help housing and started building houses for clients outside the cooperative. These provided desperately needed jobs. It also became involved in trying to improve nutrition-the cooperative now has its own garden.

Then the cooperative did something daring. It broke through a cultural taboo and started confronting the AIDS epidemic devastating South African society. It began programs offering members with AIDS special support, and set up an HIV/AIDS awareness program that is now being linked to a city-wide HIV/AIDS initiative led by an NGO that receives CIDA support.

Like any development project, the Masisizane Women's Housing Cooperative has had to overcome many challenges over its brief lifetime. But the South African government now points to the cooperative as a shining example of what can be done if people join hands to create progress.

Organizers of the World Housing Congress in 2005 summed up the story of the Masisizane Women's Housing Cooperative in this way:

"A group of women from an informal settlement without any formal training or education initiate and learn to run a multimillion-rand building enterprise for their community."

A little girl's death. A determined woman. A community willing to act as a team. A no-nonsense formula demanding full financial and "sweat" participation from all able members. An imaginative Canadian NGO with enough good sense to offer advice without trying to take over. And a government willing to acknowledge that it had been wrong in believing that self-help movements were not good.

Projects like these have stumbled and failed. Not this time, in this proud place.

A Devolution Revolution in the Philippines

"Building the Regional City" is the theme of a Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) project in the Philippines. Running uninterrupted since 1994, this unique partnership of 11 urban and rural communities centred on the historic city of Iloilo is proof that municipalities can successfully gang tackle problems that might defeat them if they acted alone.

"A decade ago, this region came to the collective realization that it was in trouble," says Iloilo Mayor Jerry Treñas. "We were in a constant state of crisis management. The issues we faced spilled from one jurisdiction to the next- mounting traffic congestion, worsening air quality, an inadequate potable water supply, deficiencies in solid-waste management, environmental degradation, flooding, and growing poverty and inequality. To move forward, we knew we needed to come together."

A new arrival to the region might at first wonder how such a beautiful place could have so many problems. Iloilo's port, located on the southern coast of the Island of Parnay, bustles with activity. Cargo ships mix with passenger ferries plying the Manila-Mindanao route. With a harbour perfectly sheltered from open seas by the adjacent island of Guimaras, it is easy to understand why the Spanish conquistadors chose this place in 1855 as a hub of maritime trade. The city of Iloilo is peppered with church spires-some built as early as the 1700s-as well as stately mansions from the time that the sugar industry flourished.

Stretched beyond the nearby suburban municipality of Oton are terraced rice fields, farming villages, and the majestic mountains of Antique. To the east and south across a narrow strait, rural Guimaras Island rises green out of the sea, the pattern of its famous mango plantations visible on the hillsides.

It all sounds very idyllic. Except that many of the area's residents struggle to survive. Squatter settlements crowd the Iloilo River, which cuts through the city. The city's sidewalks are overrun with vendor stalls, which provide meagre earnings to families trying to eke out enough income to put food on their plates. The downtown core, although busy with activity, has been deteriorating slowly under the weight of ignorance and pollution. A lack of coordinated planning and investment in infrastructure renewal has allowed traffic congestion to sputter out of control. The waste management system overflows. Flooding is routine.

These are only the visible manifestations of the problems that the region has been wrestling with over the past two decades. "And we were losing the wrestling match," says Francis Gentoral, CUI's regional manager based in Iloilo, with a rueful smile. "But then everyone started pulling together. You will still see plenty of problems here, but things are getting better in terms of health care, waste management, the economy, in all kinds of ways."

The Canada-Philippines Partnership Program for Good Urban Governance-facilitated by CUI and funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-was a response to Mayor Treñas's regional vision: that real progress would never be made if Iloilo did not take leadership in the region.

If Iloilo-a growing city of 400,000-ignored the communities in its urban growth shadow, some of their problems would inevitably gravitate inward to the big city. Likewise Iloilo, hemmed in by the sea on the east, would continue to creep outwards. Its problems would be carried closer to the adjacent municipalities of Leganes, Oton, Pavia, and San Miguel, but also to Guimaras, the island province situated across the strait from Iloilo City.

Iloilo needed these communities to succeed, and they needed Iloilo to succeed. The Philippines Local Government Code of 1991 had put an end to centuries of centralized rule in the country, so there was plenty of encouragement from Manila for decentralized initiatives. In fact, responsibilities for the delivery of most basic services had been devolved to local governments. So the time was ripe. But how to proceed? The idea of Metro Iloilo was discussed among political leaders of the various local governments in 1996, but parochial bickering kept getting in the way. It took the better part of two years to build enough political unity to agree on a metropolitan governance model that functioned equitably without leaving the central city with too much power or financial responsibility.

Rather than offer solutions, it is CUI's philosophy to expose its host country partners to possibilities. It has the capacity to take project participants to other parts of the world and show them what is working elsewhere. There is often a side benefit to these trips-people of different political stripes and points of view get a chance to talk things through and understand each other better. Given that politics is practiced with a passion at all levels of Filipino society-and given past disagreements among area politicians-this kind of bonding proved to be extremely helpful.

First to join Iloilo City were the four adjacent suburban and rural municipalities of Leganes, Oton, Pavia, and San Miguel. In February 2001, they established the Metropolitan Iloilo Development Council (MIDC), the newest metropolitan arrangement in the Philippines. Following extensive consultation with regional stakeholders, visits by Canadian regional governance experts, and CUI-organized study tours to learn how metropolitan governance works in other places, the member councils opted for a voluntary, consensus-based arrangement that draws on some of the best features of Metro Naga, established earlier in Luzon, and the Greater Vancouver Regional District.

The Council agreed to collaborate on six areas of common interest: economic promotions, infrastructure development, land use and management, public safety and security, environmental management, and basic services delivery.

"Building the Regional City" did not stop with the formation of the MIDC. More recently, steps have been taken to bring neighbouring Guimaras Province and its five rural municipalities into the regional family. Initiated in 2005, the Guimaras-Iloilo City Alliance (GICA) established a formal mechanism for regional planning, coordination of service delivery, infrastructure development (ports and roads), and joint promotion of economic development in the agro-industrial and tourism sectors. This includes an impressive new collaborative framework for marketing tourism, the region's most promising economic opportunity.

The payoffs have been impressive.

To meet the challenge of declining health services-which had been downloaded to local governments under devolution-the MIDC created the Metro Iloilo Health Alliance (MIHA), the Philippines' first metropolitan inter-local health zone. Through the MIHA, the MIDC coordinates health delivery across the region to provide more equitable access to health services as well as to reduce duplication of scarce resources. MIHA facilitates improved communication between local health facilities and higher-level regional facilities to ensure that patients are treated where they should be, and its funding component ensures the poor have access to essential services.

Prior to the MIDC, there had been little coordinated planning among municipalities in the region. One of the first acts of the new metro arrangement was to harmonize the land use plans of its five municipalities to combat urban sprawl, provide for forest and coastal protection, minimize traffic, and expand transportation choices.

Rehabilitation of the Iloilo River-the city's highly degraded watercourse-is under way with the removal of refuse and sunken debris, construction of a waterfront promenade, and a new city environment code designed to tackle waste management and pollution. Annual river clean-up events are building the community's pride and stimulating community participation.

To address mounting garbage disposal problems and ward off associated environmental and health problems, efforts are afoot to convert the city dump site to a sanitary landfill by 2007. Environmental projects in the city markets have focused on waste segregation. Organic waste is captured and put to good use while reducing the markets' contributions to the dump.

Tourism has been jump-starting the local economy of both Iloilo and Guimaras. Iloilo, for its part, made inroads when it backed private-public partnership in the promotion of the Dinagyang Festival, its famous two-day, citywide party that explodes onto the streets every January. A blend of religious and pagan traditions, celebrating both the feast of Santo Niño and the pre-colonial tradition of the ati warrior through costume and dance, the festival was started in 1968. Tourism began to grow when its management was turned over to the Iloilo Dinagyang Foundation in 2001.

"What is happening in the greater Iloilo region is nothing short of a devolution revolution," says Evelyn Trompeta, Western Visayas' regional director for the Department of Interior and Local Government, the national ministry responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Local Government Code. Because the MIDC was a purely local initiative realized through strong local leadership, she explains, there is local pride and ownership in the arrangement providing momentum and political solidarity into the future. It is indeed a testament to the power of the Code.

"The region's pursuit of good governance is paying dividends," adds Trompeta. "MIDC is now a preferred platform for implementation of national-level urban region projects. It has also begun to attract investment from a range of international development agencies from the USA, European Union, Japan, Australia, and the World Bank."

Working Children in Egypt

Poverty steals the lives of children. This is particularly true of poor children who work, children who often toil for long hours in unhealthy, unsafe conditions.

Lack of free time sometimes denies these young people normal childhood pleasures-hobbies, sport, and friendships. It can also deny them a chance to attend school and acquire skills that could provide them with a future.

Yet-except for truly oppressive or dangerous situations-the truth is that removing children from the workplace in developing countries is not usually in their best interests.

First, there are often positive elements to working. Many children in developing countries learn technical skills that will result in providing them with better-paying jobs than if they had completed school.

Secondly, in most cases where children are working, the alternative would be disastrous, both for the children and their impoverished families. Well-meaning crusaders in developed countries may pronounce that children should never work, but the situation is much more complicated.

So what can anyone do to balance a child's need to work with the fact that working conditions threaten any chance that the child will live a rewarding life? And is there anything these children can do for themselves? Can anything be done to connect them to skills and attitudes that will enhance their opportunities to make their own decisions about their lives?

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is sponsoring a development project in Egypt called "Promoting and Protecting the Interests of Children Who Work" (PPIC-Work). The project offers dual-purpose loans that help businesses get a foothold in the marketplace, while helping to improve working conditions and learning opportunities for children who work in micro and small enterprises. It also provides literacy courses and other learning activities for children. With a strong emphasis on youth participation, the project encourages children to think for themselves, express their opinions, and even help design the programs. They are involved in every step of the design cycle.

There is an emphasis on developing an understanding among the children that they have a right to make their own decisions and control their own lives. As well, it provides them with skills that will give them a better chance that their rights will be respected.

"The key when it comes to kids who work," says PPIC-Work project manager Richard Carothers, "is balance. These kids may well need to work. But they also need a chance to be kids, and they need a chance to get enough schooling to better themselves. We believe they should have some rights that will allow them both those things, and our job is to urge them to understand those rights and to urge their employers to understand them too."

Loan agreements stipulate that employers-who are sometimes the parents of the overworked children-adhere to a code of conduct that has been developed with the business owners themselves. Children must have time for other pursuits, including school or informal lessons offered by the project itself. If there are hazardous working conditions, the employer must commit to upgrading safety.

In some cases the simple provision of the loan, in itself, creates a better situation for the children. In one such example, the owner of a grocery store/restaurant used his $500 loan to purchase a new rotisserie and meat cutter. The meat cutter meant that the children did not have to cut the meat by hand, which meant that they worked in safer conditions, and that the owner needed less of their time.

In other cases, the loan itself does not make the difference, but to secure the loan business owners have to agree to allow the children to take time off to participate in other activities. Reasoned persuasion helps-the project conducts learning sessions for employers that demonstrate that providing working children with literacy and other types of skills often make them more valuable in the workplace.

"Many Egyptian families simply can't afford to send children to school," says Ed Epp, Vice-President of the Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) organization. "So many Egyptian children-particularly girls-quit school as early as the age of eight. They are essentially illiterate. It's difficult to come back in. And they don't have any options other than work. That's a fact of life."

MEDA is one of two Canadian executing agencies associated with the project. The other is Partners in Technology Exchange (PTE Ltd.), represented by Richard Carothers. Both agencies understood from the beginning that Egyptian employers would be far less likely to buy into the project-loans or no loans-if it did not have the support of respected Egyptian organizations.

This is why the two Canadian implementers work closely with several Egyptian agencies: the Egyptian Association for Community Initiatives and Development (EACID), Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services (CEOSS), Population Council, Egyptian Small and Micro-Enterprise Association (ESMA), Technical Unit (TU) of the Ministry of International Cooperation, and National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM).

Revenues from loan interest covers the costs of supplementary education programs so working children who have not left school can keep up with their courses. For children who have already left school-many of them illiterate-the project provides courses in literacy and other types of skill development, which now includes computer training.

One of the project's main themes is gender equality, and the request for computer training came from some of the girls that are being helped by the project.

"They pointed out that many of the boys were working in jobs that taught them skills, such as auto body repair, while most of the girls' jobs demand almost no technical skills," says Carothers. "They wanted to come out of this with some skills in addition to literacy, so we are complying. That's one of the great things about this project-it not only encourages the kids to recognize that they have rights with respect to their employers, but they are also encouraged to critique the project itself and help improve it. That's all part of empowerment, and empowerment is at the core of becoming an independent human being."

As the children become more and more literate, they are urged to document the changes taking place in their own lives, including changes that affect their well being in the workplace. They learn photography to help them do the documentation, and to help them recognize that they can do more than respond to orders. They can create.

"At first, people would look at us strangely when we said that photography was part of the skill set that we were exposing these children to," says Carothers. "But when you watch them see the results, it's like a light bulb has suddenly flashed for them. They take those cameras and look for meaning all around them. And it's fun."

It will, of course, take time for the PPIC-Work approach to gain widespread acceptance. There are stumbling blocks. There is the perception among many people in rich countries that no young children should work. There is the perception among some in the development community that tacking on social issues like the fate of working children to micro-financing programs brings additional costs, turns the economics critical to such projects "soft," and brings greater risk that the project will fail.

"Unfortunately, many early programs failed because there was insufficient technical knowledge and skill around the lending process itself," observes Carothers. "So donor agencies tend to focus on ensuring that the basic lending technology is sound. Agencies with a social mandate as well have over the years been branded as incompetent to manage loan funds. That may have been valid thinking at one point, but the systems for successful micro-finance are largely in place now. So it should be possible to broaden the perspective beyond the strict confines of poverty alleviation."

In fact, CIDA's first micro-finance projects in Egypt dealt only with finances, not children who work. But there was an unfortunate side effect, particularly in family businesses. When loans were granted and businesses started to expand, children were pulled into the family business for longer and longer periods of time. Their ability to perform well at school suffered and the risk of dropping out increased.

So far, PPIC-Work has had an influence on the lives of hundreds of Egyptian children. Their documentation of the changes that are starting to take place in their lives serves as testimony to the degree the project has been a success. So far, the anecdotal evidence is good.

There is Zachariah Rekaby, the 14-year-old boy from Aswan, who used to sell noodles in the street, and was often bullied by older boys. With a loan from EACID, Zachariah's family was able to set up a kiosk and buy raw noodles at a cheaper price. Zachariah, working fewer hours in a safer environment, can now focus on his studies, and the family is better positioned to pay educational fees for him, and his sisters and brothers.

There is Reham Mahmoud, the 12-year-old daughter of a man who runs a plumbing parts shop. Reham left school in 2005 to learn how to deal with customers so her father could respond to more plumbing calls. Her father has received a loan and dreams of stocking so many plumbing parts that he will become famous in the area and customers will flock to his store. Reham is taking literacy classes, has gone on PPIC-Work recreational outings, and dreams of running her own business some day.

There is 11-year-old Mahmoud Abd el Moneim, who works in an auto body shop learning the trade. He earns 40 Egyptian pounds a week and gives it all to his father, who is poor. Mahmoud was forced to quit school after four years, but is now taking PPIC-Work's literacy classes and is enjoying the drawing and singing sessions that are part of the learning package.

And there is Richard Carothers, who is encouraged. "We are now at the stage of the project where we are preparing to transfer the knowledge and skills we have picked up on to other groups in Egypt and beyond. There are a number of complexities, and problems, but overall the project has been working quite well."

Guyanese Municipalities Come Alive

Cheryl John, town clerk for the Guyanese city of New Amsterdam, gets excited when she describes what happened when one of the city's garbage trucks was knocked out of service recently.

"Our municipality has two trucks for garbage collection. One of them was down, because we had some patching to do to the tires. So some of the garbage wasn't getting picked up. Nobody would have paid much attention about that in the past. But a man called in to complain about pickup, and we explained about the tires. The next thing we knew that man arrived with a new set of tire tubes to get the truck back in service. That person voluntarily brought the tubes to fix the tires.

"Those are the kinds of things we are talking about since things started to change around here. We are talking about people coming on board and doing whatever they can to help."

Reid Levenson, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) project manager for the Guyana Municipal Governance and Management Program (MGMP), gets as excited as John when he describes the role MGMP is playing to resuscitate municipal governance in six Guyanese coastal cities.

"It hasn't been quite what we intended, but it's turned out great anyway. The goal of this program was decentralization-less central government control over everything, more strength at the municipal level where citizens can get involved in improving their own lives. Well, there hasn't really been any degree of decentralization yet-there haven't been any municipal elections since 1994 and there are none promised until 2007.

"If that sounds like bad news, maybe it is. But the program has been a success anyway because people at the local level-politicians, city employees and ordinary citizens-have embraced the concept of participatory democracy and have already started working together to improve their communities. There was a real sense of malaise at the local level a few years ago. Now there's a real sense of enthusiasm. That's a starting point that looks like it's going to lead to something really good."

Robert Williams, deputy mayor of the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, agrees wholeheartedly. "Take the Municipality of Linden, where there were great differences between citizens and municipal officials. The consequences of this program [MGMP] was that officials and citizens came together and began their self-help environmental project, cleaning of drains, alleyways, and improvement of the city's whole environment. The business community donated tools to help in the community effort. People are getting involved in every one of the six cities, and that is going to make a big difference when we finally have municipal elections."

The MGMP is a joint initiative of Guyanese and Canadian municipalities (mostly from Nova Scotia) and the governments of Guyana and Canada. The Canadian implementing agency is the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), an association of more than 1,100 Canadian municipal governments as well as provincial and territorial municipal associations. Since 1987, the FCM has supported various overseas municipalities in capacity building, knowledge sharing and implementing practical solutions to national issues.

The program is designed to strengthen local governance and management in the municipalities of Georgetown, New Amsterdam, Linden, Corriverton, Rose Hall, and Anna Regina, and to foster an enabling environment for municipal governance and development in Guyana. The twin goals are municipal governments that are competent and participatory, with a lasting understanding that competence and participation need each other if good government is to be sustained.

The MGMP created the enabling environment that got the mayors and town clerks of the six municipalities together to form the Guyana Association of Municipalities (GAM). Each of the six Guyanese municipalities drew up agendas identifying each of their sets of priorities. Then the training and dialogue began, in anticipation of municipal elections at some point down the road.

Municipal elections in Guyana were last held in 1994. They were supposed to take place in 1997, but Parliament suspended them on the grounds that there should first be local government reform. There would be no elections until a committee appointed by Parliament came up with a set of reform proposals, which it still has not done.

"The committee has not done its job," says Williams. "Still, I am convinced that we will have elections within six months of the national elections scheduled for this year. Why? Because all over the country there is this cry for change, not just because people are unhappy, but because of the councillors themselves-some have migrated, some have resigned, some did not expect to serve longer than three years and have lost interest. The government has had to put in interim management committees-two municipalities have them-because of defections. So, I expect municipal elections earlier rather than later."

John says the MGMP has been a catalyst in terms of waking up councillors and council staff to the need for dialogue with the public and of responding to the public's wishes.

"Before MGMP, the wider community was skeptical of their councillors. People didn't see the problems councils were faced with, because they weren't open. People only knew that they wanted things done, and they weren't being done. Now everything is much more open-the councillors are more understanding of what the public wants, and the public is much more aware of the councillors' restraints. Now people are behind the council-they want to be part of the council. These are people who have never been there before. If we are trying to clean up a particular area, people come out to help, and they help in other ways."

One byproduct of the process has been improved relations between Guyanese of different racial backgrounds, who tend to attach their loyalties to particular political parties. "When you establish goals for the community," says Williams, "they become the goals of all councillors, not the goals of any one political party."

Each municipality selects small projects, funded by the MGMP, after consultation with the community. In New Amsterdam, for instance, washroom facilities have been constructed at a local park, with local businesses pitching in with new benches. In Corriverton, footbridges have been restored over a canal that runs through the city, and citizens are helping to maintain them.

Williams says the MGMP had a lot to do with this new participatory spirit. "First, MGMP organized forums that brought municipal officials together to discuss how to relate to the community, how to interact with the community, and to provide an opportunity for communities to play a role in the development of activities in the future. Then the MGMP organized forums that allowed for this interaction among politicians and officials and ordinary citizens from civil society, which for the first time in many years, led to action on citizens' proposals. Before, when such meetings took place, those proposals would have been put on shelves, in archives, and nobody would have heard of them again. But under this program, municipalities are following through."

"Following through," of course, requires municipal competence-participation can quickly lead to frustration unless there is sufficient competence in place to realize community goals.

"The other component of what MGMP has given us," says Williams, "is institutional strengthening to allow us to plan properly, to work the plan and to achieve results. I, personally, as deputy mayor, having served as a councillor, as mayor before, and as deputy mayor now, have benefited tremendously ... I have begun to learn to understand results-based management approaches to projects, I have learned the management information system strategy, I have learned financial management exposure with our counterparts, particularly in Nova Scotia, with whom we are in partnership."

The Province of Nova Scotia responded quickly to an appeal from Maurice Alarie, FCM's project director for the MGMP, who was looking for Canadian partners on the project. "Team Nova Scotia" comprises municipal officials from several Nova Scotia municipalities, the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities (UNSM), the Association of Municipal Administrators of Nova Scotia (AMANS), and Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations.

Team Nova Scotia and their Guyanese partners have made several trips back and forth between the two countries to share skills, conduct training sessions, and be involved jointly in projects.

Warden Lloyd Hines of the District of Guysborough, Nova Scotia, believes that the MGMP has been "a real give and take" for both sides. "We can always learn things. Community engagement is very important, and the techniques they use in Guyana, such as community input and volunteerism, can be useful to Nova Scotia. It reaches the grass roots. It's invaluable."

"Down there we're doing things in different areas," says Ken Simpson, executive director of UNSM, "[such as] solid-waste management, financial management, and best practices in other departments."

Alarie says the scope of cooperation is broad. "We're touching on the key areas of municipal responsibilities: bylaws, financial management, taxation, income generation, governance issues, council-staff relationships, council-citizen relationships. They're learning new things like how to access funding through different channels and preparing proposals."

Nova Scotians are also helping their Guyanese partners prepare for the promised municipal elections. "We visited with all six of the municipal councils while we were [last] there and we explained the Nova Scotia model of doing orientation and training for elected officials," says Simpson. "Then we did a facilitation session based on what they'd like to see. So, we'll put in a report and they'll use it when they have municipal elections."

Robert Williams believes that there will be plenty of new councillors that will need this type of orientation and training after the elections. "You have to understand that the current councillors have been in office far too long. This program [MGMP] has created Municipal Agenda Teams, and these teams consist of persons who come from many areas of civil society. They have become so involved in the well-being of the city that when elections come, many of them are going to offer to serve as councillors now that we are all aware of what that should involve."

"What has transpired in the municipalities, to my mind, transcends excitement," says Beverly Braithwaithe-Chan, program manager of the MGMP. "The evolution and results of this distinctly new approach to capacity building in such a short period of time- amid great challenges-renders the word 'excitement' an understatement. The lesson learned here is the fact that the negative energies previously exerted by constituents towards the municipal councils was in reality loud cries and a quest to be involved."

Local Governance in Africa

It is not surprising that a Canadian non-governmental organization (NGO) is trying to help African local authorities in four countries upgrade municipal governments. It is also not surprising that it is doing so by connecting them to one another as well as to Canadian municipal governments and to various learning tools.

The mobilization of development programs that encourage decentralization and the empowerment of municipalities, after all, has been an urgent and persistent theme in the field of international development in recent years.

It may come as a surprise, however, to learn that the four countries now bonded together to wrestle with the complexities of improving municipal government communicate in three different languages: English (Ghana and Tanzania), French (Mali), and Portuguese (Mozambique).

"Yes, it costs more working in three languages, and yes, it's challenging," says Carol Kardish, regional manager for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) that runs the Africa Local Governance Program (ALGP), with support from the Canada Fund for Africa of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). "You have to have good translators when they get together, and you have to make sure that the briefs are ready in all the languages. But I am happy to say that it's working. A year ago, I would have said it was working fairly well, but now I would say it's really working."

In fact, the process is working well enough that representatives of the four countries recently agreed to try to work out a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to ensure that it be sustained beyond its 2003-2007 time frame. The MOU's goals are to "contribute to equitable development and sustainable poverty reduction through more inclusive, participatory, transparent and accountable local governance."

Kwasi Ameyaw-Cheremeh, General Secretary of the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG), outlines some of the areas in which the program, initiated at a meeting in Winnipeg in 2003, has had an effect:

"Our Association of Local Authorities in Ghana has benefited tremendously in terms of institutional strengthening through capacity-building initiatives [with] the board and staff having at various times received training of one form or another. A clear example is a training course in the results-based approach to project management and another in financial management.

"With the advent of the project, NALAG has been able to institute a Women Caucus in Local Government that is working hard to ensure that there is gender equity in local governance and that the participation and representation of women at that level is considerably increased. Through the efforts of the Caucus, awareness of the need to include women in governance has been created among the local government fraternity and beyond.

"The program has also offered us the opportunity to create and share knowledge with our partners in other countries, exchange ideas, information and experiences and learn from best practices. We have been able to link up some municipalities in Ghana with municipalities in Canada. Some of the bilateral projects undertaken by these municipalities revolve around community participation in governance, waste management and revenue generation. It is worth stating that in these municipalities there is a new awareness of the importance of getting people to participate in governance, and not just leave it to others."

Youssouf Diakité, Secretary General of the Association of Municipalities in Mali, concurs, adding that one of the most important lessons that Malian municipalities have learned from the ALGP is that now that they have developed a strategic plan that sets out priorities, and a business plan, it is far easier to deal with donor countries in deciding what type of assistance is appropriate. "Before, we didn't have any plan of action. Now we know where we want to go. Before, a donor would just come in and tell us what we needed. Now we can say 'yes' or 'no'-we want to participate in defining the project because it coincides with our development plan, or we don't want to get involved. Since that [Winnipeg] meeting in 2003 we have put a plan in action that our donor partners respect."

The original meeting, everyone recalls, featured an empty chair. Mozambique was seen as part of the group from the beginning. Like the other three countries, it was deemed to be advanced enough
in the process of decentralization and municipal empowerment to be part of the group. But it was the only one of the four countries at the time without a national association of municipalities, and it did not send a representative to the meeting.

"Since then, things have really changed for Mozambique," says Kardish. "We responded to their request to help them get a national association going, and since then they've actually taken something of a leadership role within the group."

One of the areas in which the municipalities are doing much better than three years ago, she says, "is understanding the process of policy advocacy. They're more proactively engaging with central government with decentralization issues, governance issues, and what their role is. They want to lobby governments to make sure the role of local government is really clear."

In Tanzania, various municipalities are involved in programs that include revenue collection and generation, and public participation in budgeting issues.

"Public participation in budgeting represents a very big change," says Edith Gingras, the FCM's regional coordinator for Africa. "Municipal staff are now able to go to the community and say 'this is our budget, what are you looking for in your community?' They are better trained, and more skilled at assuring that the community participates.

"When people are involved in the decision-making process, they're better able to understand what the budget is, where the council is spending their money. People are capable of understanding. Part of it is just having that understanding and being involved in municipal decisions. Part of it is ownership too."

About thirty Canadian municipalities connect to African counterparts through the FCM's International Centre for Municipal Development, offering advice on government and participating in on-the-ground projects in a wide variety of areas, including economic development, waste management, construction, revenue generation, tourism, participatory democracy, and HIV/AIDS.

If the ALGP has established a new emphasis on advocacy within municipalities within the four countries, it has done the same for women, particularly in Ghana. In February 2005, the Women Caucus of National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana publicly demanded a dramatic increase in the number of women participating in the administration of the country, demanding that at least 40 percent of district chief executives be women.

Women have also been affected in Mali. Mabintou Sako, deputy mayor of Banamba, a small city north of Bamako, says that when the women in the municipality discovered the participatory nature of the program, they decided that their community project should be tied to the promotion of civil rights and responsibilities.

"We want to have a greater voice. We want the women of our community to become increasingly active in municipal activities. We think this will help create a better city."

Sounding the Environmental Alarm in Bangladesh

The title of a 2005 report to the Government of Bangladesh addressing the state of the environment in the city of Dhaka does not hide the alarm of its authors: Dhaka Environment Programme- A One-Generation Strategy to Save the City from Environmental Catastrophe.

The word Catastrophe may be dramatic, but it is no exaggeration: Dhaka is on the brink of environmental disaster of such proportions that it could cost an untold number of lives. It could also cripple the country's economy that otherwise has the potential to pull the majority of citizens out of impoverishment.

This report is not the most visible contribution that the Canadian International Development Agency's (CIDA's) Bangladesh Environment Management Project (BEMP) has made to the country's 147 million people-there have been some others that have attracted more attention. But if the report succeeds in mobilizing Bangladesh's government as well as international financial institutions into responding to its urgent message, it will certainly be the project's most important contribution.

BEMP has already won acclaim for acting as a catalyst to two innovative environmental reforms introduced by the Bangladesh government in recent years. The first was the banning of plastic bags that were clogging Dhaka's aging draining system. The second was the banning of "baby taxis," the two-stroke, three-wheeled motorized rickshaws that kept smudging the city's skies before they were replaced with taxis fueled by compressed natural gas (CNG).

BEMP, which successfully built the capacity of the Department of Environment, carried out the research for the government on the effects of the two-stroke baby taxis, and offered solutions by demonstrating the benefits of CNG as an alternative fuel. The project also contributed to the Department of Environment's legislation to ban plastic bags.

"The Government did both, banning the plastic bags and replacing the baby taxis with CNG taxis," says an admiring Iqbal Rahman, currently BEMP's director of operations. "The taxi ban was a daring act indeed as it involved thousands of drivers and associated employees."

"Immediately there were protests from the baby taxi owners and drivers. But then came public awareness and campaigning to clear up Dhaka's air as people realized how serious the problem was. So it worked-the truth is that even the drivers wanted a change because they were getting asthma and other lung diseases themselves."

As a result of the change to CNG taxis there has been a noticeable 37 percent decrease in Dhaka's air pollution. As for the banning of plastic bags there has been a switch to bags mainly made of jute and other materials grown in Bangladesh, which decompose and-because they are water permeable-do not block drains during the three-month monsoon season. Not only do waterlogged streets present a traffic problem, they are a health hazard to anyone who has to walk them because the water mixes with human and animal waste, and industrial pollutants from factories and tanneries.

Both the taxi and plastic bag initiatives were part of BEMP's proposed program of low-cost "quick hits" to get the public on side for environmental reform. After years of deepening environmental degradation, Bangladeshis had become cynical that anything was ever going to change. The "quick hits" were designed to demonstrate that the government is serious about environmental reform, and to invite the public to enter into a partnership to turn things around.

Bangladesh's environmental problems are so huge, however, that these kinds of tactical interventions-even hundreds of them-were not going to be enough to stave off disaster, particularly in overgrown Dhaka.

With 13 million inhabitants, Dhaka is currently the eighth-largest city in the world. With the highest population growth rate of any city in the world, it is expected to contain 23 million people within the next 10 or 15 years, which would make it number two. Dhaka currently has an infrastructure capable of supporting a population of 5-10 million at best. It also sits in the middle of a flood plain, and is frequently visited by natural disasters such as tropical cyclones, storm surges, floods and tornadoes.

If Dhaka's problems with the air its citizens breath are not monumental enough, its problems with the water they drink and bathe in are even worse. Dhaka was originally settled because of its location at the hub of several rivers, providing relatively easy access to both the Bay of Bengal and other parts of the floodplain of the Jamuna, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers. These rivers and the canal system that envelops the city are badly fouled. At least 80 percent of the sewage and industrial waste produced by people and factories goes into the river system untreated. This includes human waste-one of the less charming sights in Dhaka are "hanging latrines" that line the walls of canals, sending human waste directly into their waters.

A partial list of Dhaka's other water problems includes:

• Almost all of the estimated 7,000 industries in Dhaka and vicinity dispose of their waste directly into drainage ditches and rivers without treatment.
• Unregulated development (river encroachment and loss of wetlands, in particular) is restricting the flow in the rivers around Dhaka, and reducing flood-buffering capacity in a city extremely vulnerable to flooding.
• A very high rate of ground water extraction is depleting the aquifer beneath the city, forcing an increasing reliance of Dhaka residents on a surface water supply that is severely contaminated.
• Unregulated disposal of solid waste in the drains, culverts, and rivers around Dhaka is leading to localized flooding during the monsoon, as well as increasing the risk of transmitting disease.
• Annual flood waters are usually contaminated with waste, increasing the exposure of the population to bacteria and toxic compounds.
• Boats and ships using the river system around Dhaka are unregulated, dumping oil, bilge water, sewage, and grey water into the rivers.
• There is no management strategy to reduce inputs of animal waste, fertilizers, and pesticides to the river system.

While the vast majority of Dhaka's inhabitants used to bathe with river water, most are now unwilling to do so. More and more people-many of them with little money to spare-are being forced into turning to water that has been trucked into the city, or bottled water. Shifts in employment patterns are beginning to show up, based primarily on lack of access to untainted water.

BEMP was designed to strengthen Bangladesh's Department of Environment through institutional planning, policy and legal reform, environmental management demonstration activities, environmental initiatives, awareness activities, improvement of information systems, human resource development, and guidance in project management.

In 2003, it took on a special mission designed to harmonize the environmental activities of a number of government departments to help galvanize a concerted effort to fend off environmental disaster, particularly with respect to water problems. In cooperation with the Department of Environment as well as local and international consultants, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and representatives of international institutions, BEMP became involved in the Dhaka Environment Programme, established to develop a plan to save Dhaka from a watery death.

John Carter, an independent Canadian consultant working for the Canadian firm BearingPoint, the Canadian executing agency for BEMP, was given the task of compiling the contributors' input- including authors of earlier reports-and fashioning a proposal to combat Dhaka's water problems. He presented the report, the Dhaka Environment Programme-A One-Generation Strategy to Save the City from Environmental Catastrophe, to leading government officials in early 2005.

The strategy-to be implemented over a 20 year period, with an investment of at least US$8 billion-was intended to serve as a guide to further discussions and stakeholder consultations, and lead to securing funds and early implementation of the proposed actions. "There is no time left to waste," the report warned. "We all share the blame for this dire situation. Now let us develop an appropriate, collective, future vision of Dhaka and proceed to save the city."

The report made a sophisticated series of recommendations on how Dhaka could clean up its act, including some that were quite Draconian. These included a moratorium on establishing any new industries in over-saturated areas, a ban on chemical fertilizers and pesticides within a 30 km, radius of Dhaka, and moving a complex of tanneries dumping toxic wastes into the river to a location out of the city.

The report warned that Bangladesh stands to lose an estimated US$51.1 billion over the next twenty years if nothing is done to stem financial losses accruing from losses in agricultural and fisheries production, deterioration of human health, flooding, time lost in procuring drinking water, lack of financial return on providing water and other urban services, and lost opportunities for business investments.

Despite earlier successes with the government on issues like the baby taxis and plastic bags, not all members of the project were convinced that all of these solid recommendations would lead to action. After all, near the very top of the report had been a quote from another Canadian consultant working on the BEMP, Richard Higgins:

"The present environmental disaster has developed through an almost total leadership vacuum regarding management of the sewers, canals and waterways, waste treatment and landfill in and around Dhaka. The institutional problems of the past decade continue today and, with every month of neglect, the Dhaka environment gets worse."

But government representatives applauded the report, and said the government was committed to continue on the path of environmental reform. Tariqul Islam, Minister of Environment and Forests, acknowledged, "Dhaka will become one of the most environmentally hazardous cities unless a healthy environment can be assured through sustainable strategic programs. But we need a strong institutional structure and a long-term strategy to make the government's initiatives permanent."

There have been some good signs. The government has hired a significant number of new personnel at the Department of Environment. John Carter, who has since returned to Canada to work on other environmental projects, points out that a new $100 million World Bank loan includes funding for one of the "quick hits" recommended in the report. This would provide settling ponds and a constructed wetland in Dhaka East to allow for relatively low-cost treatment of waste water from the Tejgaon Industrial Area, and a reduced pollution load at the intake for the Saidabad water treatment plant. Other international financial institutions and donors have recently made commitments to address some of the other pressing urban environmental challenges defined in the strategy.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," says Carter. "The government says it is serious, and this isn't something we tried to impose on them-they were deeply involved in putting the plan together. There is a heightened understanding of the importance of acting now, and for the first time in years, a significant level of investment proposed to improve Dhaka's water quality."

Carter was not always as optimistic. He can remember standing out front of the notorious tanneries at Hazaribagh, a suburb of Dhaka, which dump toxic waste directly into a river used by neighbouring residents. "You can barely stand there because of the stench-it burns your nose," he says. "And you think 'this must be the most polluted place on the face of the earth, and cleaning it up has been a frontline issue for ten or fifteen years, and nothing has been done.' And, at times like that, you wonder if anything ever will be done.

"And then you think, Dhaka's environmental problems are so massive, the only way we're going to deal with them is to take one bite out of them at a time. So let's get going and do that."

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Thinking Big - Responding to Urbanization in the Developing World (557 Kb, 55 pages)