Dialogue 2 - Transforming Informal Settlements and Slums for Housing the World (WUF13)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 13th session of the World Urban Forum and this crucial dialogue today on transforming informal settlements and slums for housing the world.
Thanks so much for joining us in person and also welcome to those tuning in online from wherever you are in the world.
We are live streaming this session and we will record it too.
I'm here to take us through the next hour and a half.
My name is Nazanin Mashiri and I am a former presenter and journalist at Al Jaeera English, Reuters, ITN, the BBC, and now a professional host and speaker for moderate the Panel.
After years in Nairobi, I'm now based in Berlin, working as a senior advisor for Birkhoff Foundation.
You can look forward to some high level speakers and interactive activity hosted by me and hold on to those cards that you have on your seats.
You will need them later.
First of all, I'd like to invite Minister Mikhail Jabov, the Minister of Economy, for Azerbijan who of course, are hosting this to come and please take a seat.
Thank you, Minister.
We're still waiting for our Executive Director of UN Habitat, Anna Claudia Rossbach, who I believe has just walked in.
Thank you so much.
Executive Director, could you please take a seat? Thank you.
Why are we here today? We all know about the plight of people living in informal settlements and slums.
I remember one of the first stories that I covered at Al Jaeera English.
Was from one of the biggest slums in the world in Kabira in Nairobi, of course, UN habitats home.
The global figures are absolutely astounding.
The number of people living in informal settlements and slums around the world is expected to rise from currently around 1.1 billion people to 2 billion people by 2050.
Just take that in for one moment.
We're here, yes, to talk about the problems, but we're also here to talk crucially on how we are going to transform these settlements into connected, serviced, and equitable neighborhoods around the world.
First, I'm really honored to say to kick things off, we're going to introduce the Minister of Economy for Azerbijan, of course, our host here in Baku, Mikhail Jabarov, who is going to give us the opening remarks.
Minister, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
I Honorable Executive Director, Your Excellency, honorable mayors, ladies and gentlemen.
It's a great pleasure and honor to welcome you to this important dialogue on behalf of the government of Azerbijan, the host country of 13 session of World Durban Forum and thank you for joining us here in Azerbijan.
Allow me to start with the context of my country because this topic is universal.
We have faced similar issue.
For that, I'd like to take you to history of independence, which we proclaimed in 1991.
Pre 1991, Azerbijan was part of the Soviet Union and in that sense, informal housing and slums, although existed but they were never acknowledged as a matter of government policy.
In 1991, faced with challenge of independence and necessity to do state building, coupled with the occupation of Azerbijan territories and constant permanent flow of refugees, Azerbijanis living in Armenia, as well as IDPs, internally displaced persons from occupied territories.
That was a very big pressure.
Why I say second because in fact, it started even during Soviet time in 1989, we already had the first refugees arriving.
That coupled with the third factor, and this is a socio economic crisis which all post Soviet Union countries were living at to give you a scale, economy of Azerbijan in 1994 was one third of economy of Azerbijan in 1991.
And of course, that led to additional pressure.
Last but not the least, for the coming decade, of course, the process of forced social migration, mainly stemming from economic challenges have added to the picture and all of this was happening on the basis of the demographic boom because country at the time of establishing of independence was 7 million nation and in the next 25 years it became 10 million nation.
Big picture is that you have one in eight citizens in the country being either refugee or IDP, you have significant demographic growth.
You similarly are faced with certain socio economic challenges which we started to stabilize and handle around 90s and therefore, we took three periods relevant for today's subject.
This is a period 1991 to 2003.
2003 launched a new period, and this is when we were able country was economically sufficient and stable enough to start liquidating what was called starting from tentative camps where mainly IDPs and refugees were housed, but also to start to address the issue of the classic informal housing.
Finally, 2021 next period was 2003, 2020.
That was what I just mentioned and 2020 up until now ongoing period is mainly marked by the great return and I'm sure within the framework of this forum, there was a lot of discussion on the urban reconstruction activity that is going on in liberated territories that will take off the big part and portion of pressure off because finally after 30 plus years, many people are returning.
What are the lessons we drew in the process? Challenges are obvious.
I won't stop a lot on them.
I guess this will be discussed in details today at session starting from health care and educational provision to informal economy.
But what were our lessons? Well, first and foremost, we do believe that the approach which needed a to recognize the problem, As I said, this was something that we have to start with in our opinion, designing the solution, and here we believe we do see a number of, I would say, contributing inputs, ranging from political aspects to social to economic.
But of course, community buy in and this leads us to the third element, which is implementation.
Community buy in willingness and ability of government to tackle the problem, reliance on the working economic models with participation of private sector, and this is at a high level.
This is what we believe worked in our case.
I'd like also to mention that in recent years, we have taken a number of steps to also move in the direction of simplification of procedures for permitting the operation of multi apartment residential building and certain types of amnesties for those houses and for those types of informal settlements which met basic city building standards.
At the same time, our experience has shown us That legalization must be approached very carefully because a simple amnesty for unauthorized construction may solve certain social concerns at point in time, but it can also create long term risks by encouraging further illegal construction, unsafe buildings and land use, and pressure on agriculture, land, forest land, water resources, and critical infrastructure zones.
The approach we have taken is a balanced, protecting on one hand, citizens rights and social needs, at the same time, strengthening legal discipline, safety standards, and responsible land governance.
Maybe the last point given the time I have for this intervention, I'd like to make relates to economical aspects of this because very often policymakers and governments are faced with an issue of, on one hand, you have a lot of shadow economic activity associated with this type of housing and settlements, but on another hand, you do need funding.
What would you do? Are you really going to close the jobs and reduce contract economic activity to solve the problem? Um, um, that's in a way a vicious circle.
Example of Azerbaijan and this is a specific targeted reform we did in 2019 till 2025 for seven years, was a project that um uh put forward the legalization of informal jobs with the for the purpose of creating an additional source of funding to address the very same problem.
In a very short, you have people out with of the social protection system.
They are paid on a cash basis, government has no receipts from it.
That was a starting situation.
At the end of the day, you have a situation when a person is incorporated into the Social Security system.
Part of the revenues and receipts which are made on Social Security contributions are managed to provide housing to those who are in need on the basis of social protection need.
In that sense, you are getting a community buy in and in our particular case, I'm not going into the details of this fiscal reform, but it resulted in more than tripling uh, in real terms, the volume of revenues coming from legalization of, um, employment within that communities, which did create a significant source of funding for addressing the social needs of the very same people.
With this, allow me to wish all the participants very fruitful discussion and for those who are first time to Azerbijan to Baku, please enjoy the day after your deliberations are over and discover our city for yourself.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Minister Jabaov, the Minister of Economy of Azerbijan our hosts.
Such powerful opening reflections on the scale of the challenge here in Azerbijan very context specific, but I think some of the lessons that the minister brought up could be scaled elsewhere.
It was interesting that we had some of the economics and the finance issues in there as well.
Of course, funding is a big problem for a lot of the countries, and I think hopefully we'll be able to talk about that during the other sessions.
Really a brilliant segue into our next opening speaker.
I'm delighted to invite U and Habitats Executive Director, Anna Claudia Rossbach, who will help us frame today's discussion.
Over to you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Naz Amin, Excellency, Minister.
First, thank you so much for your presentation.
As I just mentioned, I was not aware of this history of informal settlements and labor in Azerbijan and I think it's very important for us, also UN habitat to improve our knowledge because informal settlements are in the world, they feature differently.
There's such a high diversity and it's critical that we understand all the perspectives and we capture how governments have been addressing the challenges and finances is a big one.
But then good morning to all of you.
This is the session where my heart is located just for your information.
Um, but I do appreciate that I have here some script.
Otherwise, I will lose myself here and talk forever about informal settlements.
My own experience working on informal settlements, my country where I come from in Brazil, but also globally with slum dwellers international, with organized communities, with other member states, with other countries in the history of my life that have also invested in the area.
But I mentioned that before we have 1 billion.
These are the estimates of your inhabitant this year.
We have to review SDG 11.
SDG 11.1 talks about informal settlements and all the reviews are showing already that we are not progressing, unfortunately.
I just came from the Sustainable Development forum in Adis.
In Africa specifically, it's a red flag, but in Latin America, they are expanding in Southeast Asia, and we have 2 billion people coming to cities in the next couple of decades.
As we speak, we have people now living in very precarious conditions, not having a tap access to basic water, electricity, sanitation, women that don't have opportunities, you don't have a toilet at home, young people that don't have address to find a job, entrepreneurs that cannot start their business.
There's a strong intersection between informal settlements and health um, we know that there is enough, there's a lot of evidence around that, a lot of evidence around the intersections of climate change and informal settlements.
They are the first to suffer the impact of climate change, economic downtowns, and so on, and children, um, If we look at informal settlements, we see that around 4,000,350 to 500 million of those are actually in informal settlements and we cannot afford to have another generation of children living in slums.
Having strong housing policies is critical because we need to expand the supply of housing and we have plenty of experience that we are discussing throughout this forum.
But community led upgrading, public policies to upgrade, not only upgrade, but integrate informal settlements in the city, investment in informal settlements.
Recognizing these investments, Minister, not as social expenditures, but recognizing these investments as investments because they are investments.
Once you invest in informal settlements, the multiplier effect will come, jobs will be created, local economies will thrive and these will reflect in the country's GDPs.
The good news is that actually, we have a lot of experiences of upgrading informal settlements.
We have experiences led by communities, by local governments.
We have countries that decided to design Islam upgrading strategies as here at a national scale.
We have many projects and many interventions all over the world.
But actually, I think as a society, we haven't been able to address at scale.
We haven't been able to transform this projects in systemic change.
And really make sure that addressing informal settlements is incorporated in the national systems in the laws, in the regulations, in the finance systems and locally.
And I believe now where we are coming close to this review of the new urban agenda at midterm, it's very important that we recognize that we failed and it's clear to me on this front, we failed as a society and we cannot afford to wait much more because it's a humanitarian situation.
It's a human rights situation, it's a humanitarian situation.
So just to highlight three aspects, we have been discussing also the transformation of informal settlements with our member states through the open ended working group on housing that you Azerbaijan is now sharing with Somalia before Kenya and France was sharing and we have a set of of policy provisional recommendations on how to address a transformation of informal settlements.
But just to highlight a couple of aspects.
The first aspect is recognition, data and information is critical because if we don't have that, we cannot monitor SDG 11.1, recognition at the local level, by the cities, recognition at the national level, by the census, by the Statistics Bureau is critical.
And we have to recognize that these territories, they are spaces of opportunities.
If we look at the global South, we see that people come into the cities.
They had the informal settlements as gateways to access education, health, jobs, and opportunities.
And it's important that we recognize that land has a social and ecological function.
So respect that these occupations were the only option, and if they are consolidated, we really need to address them where they are.
Um, so the second message is about integration.
So we need integrated solutions here.
We need all the sectors to work together because we're talking about transforming communities, bringing services, social amenities, leisure, culture, sports, connecting to the cities through the public transportation.
Connect formal and informal transportation.
This has been happening a lot in many, many countries.
You see in Asia and Africa in Latin America where informal transportation has been created and then connected with formal transportation.
It cannot be isolated projects, we really need to be systemic about it.
The third point is finance.
We need money.
It's expensive.
And there is money available.
Communities have proven.
They have come together.
We have many experience, SDI, SHR, other social movements in Latin America.
I'm seeing here, the familiar faces have come together and put their savings together and helped to fund cities are leveraging revenues from land based finance, property taxes, betterment contributions, Colombia and so on to try to improve the revenues and the financial capacity.
We have the governments that at the national scale, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, I'm looking here have decided to put public money and invest public money at large scale, the national scale into that.
But we need to recognize that they are there.
We need to have clear mechanism, zoning mechanisms that will enable utilities to connect the services, will enable the governments to connect all the systems.
We have the solutions at all scales, community city project examples, amazing projects, amazing projects on improving slums, you and Haptat had a program, the PSUP, amazing projects everywhere, but now we really need to deal with that in a really strong manner and with strong intention.
The good news is that I've been observing there is political will to deal with that and this needs to come from high level leadership.
I really hope that this dialogue will contribute to our agenda.
All the experts here were, co curated because you know the answers, so you brought to you here because if you don't help us to find the answers, I don't know who else.
Thank you very much also you experts for coming here today, from the government, from the academia, from the communities, because as I said at the opening, we have to bring the pieces together and hoping also that this session will contribute to the Baku call to action.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much to Anna Claudia Rossbach, the Executive Director of UN Habitat, and also to the Minister of Economy.
Just such powerful remarks there.
Really interesting that you spoke about the multiplying effect of transforming these urban settlements, which I think is really important.
Remembering the impact on children, that figure was so stark, hundreds of millions of children, your new generation growing up in those urban settlements and in those slum areas.
And I guess this is what we're here for? This dialogue, we've brought the experts in from around the world.
I think it's very important that they're in the room with us and hopefully we're going to try and find some solutions throughout the day.
But I want to thank you both and you're welcome to please leave the stage.
Thank you so much.
A big round of applause.
All right.
We're changing the program slightly, and we're going to invite our next speaker, Mary Hook Simmer, who is a professor in the School of Architecture at Whit University in South Africa.
Mary's important work focuses on what is required for informal settlement transformation.
Marie, the floor is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's a great discussion in this panel that will follow.
It's also no easy feat to follow the host country's Minister of Economy and our Executive Director of human habitat, all protocol observed.
I As we've been hearing from many speakers at this forum, the question of informal settlements, in other words, neighborhoods that are officially unplanned is central to the contemporary development endeavor.
Informal settlements are not only a temporary peripheral matter in a few underdeveloped cities.
They exist and have persisted in the most prominent aspirant world class cities, displaying an irregular and irregular fabric that sits at odds with the state and market aspirations of modern urban development.
Whether in Sao Paolo's modernity of the 1970s or the more recent modernity enabled by economic changes in cities such as Guangzhou or even Baku, informal settlements have absorbed unmet housing demand, including that of the much needed construction laborers, many cities have been unable to expand their housing stock and affordable servicing of land, meaning that informal settlements have also come to accommodate the lower middle class, often with substantial investment in urban homes over many years.
If at yesterday's dialogue one, we were told that cities are complex.
In today's dialogue, we need to start from the basis that informal settlements may be even more complex.
They are also hugely diverse.
They exist through parallel systems of governance, norms, and regulation, and of access to services.
Rental markets increasingly define and reshape informal settlements at different scales, further absorbing unmet housing demand.
This can result in the urban villages, in Chinese cities, in multi story rental establishments, so urban villages being an example, and often this happens on very dense informal layouts.
These urban villages were once the subject of mass demolitions in China, but a shift in China's economy has allowed urban villages increasingly to be recognized as vibrant parts of cities and as needing careful understanding and improvement.
Who benefits from the rental income within informal settlements can vary from small scale landlords or technically structure owners as they are called in Kenya, to large scale extractive investments exploiting the absence of regulation and even using violence to bypass it.
In highly unequal countries, the extractive tentacles of criminal syndicates, often with links into corrupt elements in government, are reaching into the officially unplanned territories, governing and servicing them by force and extracting ill gotten wealth from impoverished households that have no choice.
As an academic, I can attest that a deep grappling with this theme dominates recent literature on the favelas or barrios also represented by Latin American scholars in sessions at this World Urban Forum.
But informal settlements are highly diverse.
In Brazil, as in South Africa, many are democratically organized, and some exist as communes based on solidarity and alternative forms of collective living.
The support that these demand from the state is different to the complex interventions needed in territories governed by violent criminal formations.
Much lies between these two extremes.
What Latin American studies show us is how important the correct form of state intervention is at or from a critical time in the trajectory of an informal settlement and that an ongoing presence of the state is needed, not least in the form of access to policing.
A potentially transformative technical innovation from the City of Johannesburg where I come from is a combination of lighting, free Wi Fi, and CCTV cameras installed in informal settlements that promises a rapid response by the police and therefore improved safety in informal settlements, particularly for women and children.
But let me take one step back and present how we have categorized the spectrum of state approaches to informal settlements from least desirable to the approach that encompasses the pathways that you inhabitat and many other entities are promoting.
Firstly, there is the repressive approach, forceful eviction, removal despite resistance.
Here, I'd like to flag that although targets do play an important role and may be noble, the target of doing away with informal settlements such as eradication targets, these unfortunately often end up being pursued in repressive ways involving violations of human rights.
The second approach is deterministic, the state prescribing a solution with little participation or choice by those the solution is intended for.
Thirdly, there is tolerance or ambivalence, a prolonged situation in which the state is absent and that over time may enable the infiltration by criminal elements.
The remaining approaches that I'm mentioning are often combined and include the one that we are promoting mostly at this point.
Fourthly is a transitional approach, granting a temporary legal status and managing informal settlements over prolonged periods through, for instance, temporary forms of sanitation and other services.
Firstly is the approach that we call amnesty and it's very interesting that it featured in the minister's presentation just now.
This would be, for instance, through cutoff dates that define inclusion and exclusion in state programs depending on the length of time the informal settlement has been in existence.
Lastly, then, transformation.
Transforming informal settlements.
This builds on what already exists.
Transforming requires deep participation.
So now call this co production, and because of this participatory element, it's closely associated with the right to the city, which is the right to be involved in the making of one's neighborhood and in that way in one's city.
This panel is about transforming informal settlements and slums.
The signals that there is a consensus that this approach holds answers to the pressing question of informal settlements Um, which I started with.
Consensus on this approach is only the start.
What has to follow is policy, regulation, and institutional reform as the ED was mentioning.
What also has to is the building of expertise and in the correct entities within the state.
But what about informal settlements that are yet to come? Commitments to informal settlement transformation is often twinned with prevention.
But prevention can be done in less or more desirable ways, for instance, through repression or through getting ahead of the demand by increasing service land in ways that absorbs demand and that would be the more desirable approach.
Much work has to go into how to get this right because what is clearly predicted is that with the reach of AI into the workplace globally, inequality is going to rise even further with an impact on migration.
Land occupation is a highly political issue that is contested from the perspective of different political ideologies.
The system is the Western system based on property rights, economic growth, and individualized middle class values contradicts the granting and upholding of occupational rights associated with more communal and indigenous systems.
This will be an ongoing contest in many countries.
Plurlizing policy and legislation prevents polarization, while also allowing towns and cities to absorb urbanization, particularly on the African continent for which predictions of demographic change are highest.
With these provocations, I look forward very much to the deliberations of a very distinguished panel or two that will follow.
Thank you very much.
Huge thanks there to Professor Marie Hooker for reminding us that it is about the people, the communities at the heart of informal settlements and consensus is only the start.
We have to work on the policies, we have to work on the framings, we have to work on the funding, and we need the political will.
Now, we are changing track a little bit.
We're going to do something a little bit different today and I would really like you, everyone on your phones to possibly put them down for a little bit, if you can.
Remember I told you at the beginning, you've got your cards on your seats.
Could you just take them out and put them on your lap? Thank you so much.
We're going to do something a little bit interactive, exciting, interesting, and hopefully we're going to transport you out of a stadium in Baku in your minds at least to the informal settlements and the slums that we're talking about.
Look, I'm going to read you the instructions of what you need to do, okay? Um, some of you will need your reading glasses, sorry.
The writing is a little bit small.
Each of you has a roll card.
You've got it in your hand.
Each card represents a profile of a person.
You could be a mother with children.
You've got to imagine this, with it.
You could be a recent tenant, you could be a long term community leader.
You may have access to services and finances.
You may not.
Please get your cards.
Yeah, everyone got your card.
Waive them.
Waive them, please.
Thank you so much.
Right.
What I'm going to do is ask you five questions.
When I read the questions one by one, listen carefully to the question and if it refers to your profile, please stand up.
Obviously, if it doesn't, just stay seated.
Then I'll ask you to sit down.
When you stand up, please just look around the room if you can, and just take it in because The figures are going to represent the actual global figures of people living in informal settlements in slums.
Does everybody understand? Okay, great.
Here we go.
First question.
Please stand up if you have been living in your current informal settlement for less than two years.
You've been there less than two years, you have no formal tenancy, please do stand up if you've been living in your settlement for less than two years.
Anyone living in your settlement less than two years? You could be somebody who's just moved to an informal settlement.
We have a few people and actually that figure is right, please stay standing.
Thank you.
You can sit down.
Sorry.
That figure is actually right because there are two to 3% of the total slum population who just arrived.
The global slum population is growing by roughly 25 to 30 million people a year.
You've just arrived and the people actually living in those informal settlements have been there, some of them for generations.
The newly arrived are coming, but they are a smaller percentage.
Okay, you're doing really well here because a lot of you stay seated.
That's great.
We have some other figures here for you, which I think are really relevant as well.
I think the most relevant one is that 60% of urban populations will be under 18 by 2030.
We heard that from the executive director about how crucial it is that we make sure that we deal with this issue.
We have a bulging generation of children who are growing up in these really awful conditions.
Thank you.
So we also have a map here showing the urban population living in informal settlements.
You can see if you look closely at the map, those darker red areas, where are those areas where most of them seem to be, unfortunately, in Sub Saharan Africa? Okay.
Question two, more of you are going to be standing up, so please please do listening.
Do you lack safe drinking water at home? Do you share a toilet with more than five other households? Please do stand up.
We have a lot more people standing up.
You could be a mother with a family with no piped water, sharing a latrine with more than 15 people.
Please do look around and you can see this represents what we're talking about.
Just look around.
Thank you so much.
You can take a seat now.
Thank you so much.
You're getting really into this now.
This is great.
The figures are really stark.
73% of those living in informal settlements lack safely managed water or adequate sanitation.
You can see all of you standing up, that's about two thirds of you do not have access to sufficient water or sanitation.
The figures globally are stark, 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water.
We all walked in here today, we have water all around us.
We have toilets.
Unfortunately, many of the places I've reported from when I was working at Al Jazeera do not have that and they still do not have that.
Also, we have more per litre paid by informal settlement residents buying from vendors compared to connected households.
We need to connect those people to clean and safe water.
Water is a really big issue with the impacts of climate change as we all know.
Now, please stand if you have not you personally, but whoever's in your profile, if you have never accessed or been able to access a bank loan, a mortgage, it's out of reach for you when it comes to improving or buying your home.
I think again, this is going to be quite a lot of you.
Thank you.
If we just look at those figures, that is almost all of you actually.
That's actually very, very stark.
95% of you should be standing right now.
You have never accessed formal or semi formal housing finance and we're going to be talking about this later on the panels.
Please do give us some solutions on that if you can.
And the figures on that are really stark again, I would say, for Sub Saharan Africa and other parts of the world.
If we could just move on to some of those figures.
We have the figure there of global climate finance, of course, but we also have a figure on number of households in the global South with access, so that's one to 5%.
But I know for a fact that around 90%, that's nine out of ten Africans are totally excluded from the housing market.
Thank you so much for that.
This is a really easy one.
Now, please stand up if your profile is a woman or a child.
Okay.
Now, 58%, that's just over half of you should be standing of people in informal settlements are women or children.
Just look around you.
Thank you.
They're 58%, but they are the most exposed, I would say, in terms of the compounding risks that women and children face in terms of violence, instability linked to land tenure in those informal settlements, of course.
Look, urban poverty is becoming increasingly feminized.
We know this.
I guess the informal settlements of the slums are the most visible expression of that and some stark figures there.
80% of developing countries, women aged 15 to 49.
They're overrepresented in urban slums relative to men of the same age.
Thank you.
Right.
This is the final question.
I know your feet are hurting, so you don't have to stand up anymore after this.
Please do stand up if you are renting the home that you live in.
Again, this is going to be most of you.
I mean, there are very few homeowners in slums and informal settlements.
Just look around.
76% of informal settlement residents are tenants with no lease, they have no protection.
They have no guaranteed benefit from upgrading.
Look around you.
You can take a seat.
I know.
You're relieved.
No more standing up.
Your exercise is done for the day.
Thank you so much for your patience.
You have all been so brilliant.
A round of applause for everyone.
Thank you.
I really hope this energized us because we are trying to visualize the stark realities for the 1.1 billion people living in informal settlements worldwide.
They're trapped not just by choice, of course, but by decades of underinvestment.
This is why the next part of a dialogue, please don't go anywhere.
This is really crucial, is so important because we need political will.
We need integrated policies, and we need all of your voices in this room.
I'm really pleased to hand over now to Ady Kumar.
Where are you, Addy? There you are.
Add Kumar is a wonderful senior advisor and he is a senior advisor and stakeholder stakeholders at UN Habitat.
He has a long history of working with civil society on housing and informal settlements.
We are on safe hands with Addy Addy.
You have the floor.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Nazanin.
Wow, that was some exercise, and I can guarantee it's going to get better from here onwards.
So the first panel, we have two stalwarts.
These people have literally defined the practice of informal settlement upgrading and use of data led by communities, driven by communities in the world.
I'm very pleased to welcome to stage, firstly, Sumsuk Bona Bana.
She's the chairperson of the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights and the founder and chairperson of Cody and the upgrading program within Cody.
Welcome, Sumsuk.
And with her, I would like to invite Ryu Khosla, who's the Director for the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence in India.
A round of applause, please.
Yes, please.
The last time I heard Sosook in Cape Town was in 2012 and it was a life changing experience for me.
Sumsok I'm going to go straight to it.
Ban Mong Kong reached over 300 Thai cities through community savings, government co production, an incredible program that we've all read and learned so much from.
Perhaps you can frame for us what were the key solutions, levers, markers that enabled it to get to the national and international scale.
Okay.
Thank you, Adi.
Thank you, you inhabitat for this invitation and this is one of the most important session.
I accept the invitation.
Otherwise, I will stay home to share with you my almost 50 years experience that we could find a new way of dealing with the informal settlement with the people by the people in a big way.
I need the slide, please.
N one, please.
Yeah.
This one.
We are talking about a paradigm a paradigm chip in solving the problem of the poor community at scale, how to support the people community housing solution at citywide scale.
We are talking about scale of change, not just freestanding project here and there or construction project, but a process of change in a big way.
I assure you anywhere in the world.
I've been traveling so much, I can tell you that community can do it, poor people can do it, and they want to change.
With that element of people, which we need to understand how we find the solution to support the change in which they are the active actor.
There are five key point to tip this change into scale by the people.
Number one is that we need to have a concept of demand instead of supply.
Consumption, government led, private sector alone.
Here, people, community driven, community organization and networking, let them link together to collaborate with the other actor, to start off to be the active actor, to make the big move.
Number one, let the people be the actors and the solution.
If you have big problem and people in the community become the solution actor, it means number of problem become number of solutions.
This is the way to think about.
The second part is that don't do it project by project, but do it city wide? And work in action to get the information, to map all the community, to make the plan covering our community to negotiate for all the possible land, existing land, new land, whatever, where are the possible land to make secure housing.
Let the people and the system work together and get the architect to support the participatory plan.
Number third is we have to work as a collaborative process.
This is very important.
We need a hybrid system between government, professional, and community.
We need to adjust the culture, between the professional side and the people side, people need knowledge, system need people to understand how the working process of the people are.
You need a hybrid mechanism which need to be organized at different level.
The fourth point is we need a new system of finance, community finance, city finance, the finance that is more friendly to the people to support the change and the new housing construction by the people.
The fib is that don't look at housing only as a physical a achievement.
Housing is a starting point to build people, to build community, to be active citizen.
So we focus on people, we focus on organization, and we use housing to allow them the legal platform for many other active move in the city at the same time.
Now I'm going to show you the picture.
The first picture show you the citywide mapping.
If we start by mapping the low income settlement or the n in the city, you put together this whole information, get the people in the community to be the active actor in making a survey and through the process, let them have discussion, organize them as a group, get a collaboration with the city so This information become the information of the community, become the information of the university, become the information of the city at the same time.
So we share the same information and cover everybody.
Everybody is a part of this change.
Nobody left behind.
This is the picture to show that through the process, we get the community into an active actor to do the survey, to check each other and to discuss different aspect about their life in each of the communities.
So through the process, you already boost the people to be the active actor and a lot of discussion meetings, planning, and so on.
And this is the picture to show how the planning process has been organized.
We could do it at the same time, so people have a dream of a new beautiful community, how it looked like, and give them the inspiration to move forward, not to stay as before.
We can change, but we need to move.
We have a lot of homework to do, we need to do this, we need to do that.
We have to check, we need to negotiate like that to work as an active unit.
Together as a network, as a system in different community, and then organize the saving.
Housing development is a lot of investment.
Everybody had to organize their finance as a family system and as a community fund and link with the other funding system.
So money system have to be organized and saving is very important because it let everybody to be more disciplined and women role will be enhanced to the saving activity as well.
Then there are different form of the housing option.
It could be in the same place, it could move into a new place.
You could see the reconstruction of the former slum in the center.
You can see the land sharing, you can see the resettlement, you can see further away resettlement and so on.
The form can come afterward, wherever land could be secure.
We don't come with the form first, as the supply side always have, you construct something and then you want the poor to go into that and they're not going because it doesn't fit them.
Here, you start with the people and plan with them, the form and the system of finance and let it move further.
These are some of the pictures which show the former slump after the reconstruction and then the proper area.
This is about 10,000 family along 23 canals in Bangkok, a This is some of the picture as well showing the former slum and the change in the same place.
It could go up as the higher floor, medium rise, former slum, these are all slum people and change the bigger area as a little main project mix the low rise and the high rise together.
What is important is all these process lead to a collective management.
We build people We're not building physical stuff and we plow with number of unit, this, number of unit, that.
But we build people and the system of community collectively.
So the community become the welfare unit in itself.
It has a better economic activity, it has a food production, it has strong organization to work with the city, and they become active citizens.
They can negotiate now with whatever fit more to their life and their community and different group of people, elderly, children, whatever can have their own organization.
Well, this is a little complex diagram, but it's necessarily the last one, that the system of coding, which I've been working now, but I don't want to show cody or qualify this, but it's a example that we need a system in the government, the ministerial system, and the people, and it's a collaborative system.
This is a system in which we pass the subsidy and the loan directly to community.
When community organize, negotiate for land, and have a proper plan and make a calculation then how this project is possible, we pass the budget to them and they are the owner of the project.
They manage the project as a corporative, and then we pay properly.
We payment 97 98%.
So community poor people are bankable.
They are okay with finance.
The system are not okay.
The system doesn't understand how the finance system of the poor people are working.
And then they become victim.
So my point here, which is the process in which we work all over the country, more than 1,400 projects all over Thailand to tell you that the repayment is workable, is 97 98%.
But it needs a little bit the understanding that the organization give the loan as a collective loan to the group maybe one into subgroup and they add 2% margin for adjusting the different process of the formal and informal one, they collect it.
And daily pay.
Now we also have the government housing bank in which it could refinance when the loan of the community is not working properly.
You sell the loan to the bank, and then you get more money and you start with a new one, which is a little more difficult in the beginning until they are steady, then you pass it to the bank.
So this is the system which make finance work.
And it is economic generation.
You may say that, Thai government is generous while giving a lot of subsidy.
It's the same subsidy as all the public housing in the world.
On we develop the subsidy in such a way that we pass it to community and the government will get the subsidy back because housing development is economic generation, social investment.
Like the minister said that the whole country has been developed because of housing development.
Thank you very much.
Amazing, Sos.
This story always inspires all of us into so much action.
The scale, the extent, the process, the participation, the community led process is incredible.
Thank you, Sos.
Reno, I'm going to focus on the next question for you and clearly Cure India has worked a lot with community based data.
I really want to pick your brain around an instrument and a tool that you've developed called the Erb gov tool, where you've managed to use spatial data and put it in the hands of community, but used it as a tool to engage government.
Perhaps you could shed some light on how this better data has been used by government in changing some of the processes that they've been involved in and perhaps some of the roadblocks and challenges you may have experienced in the process.
Thanks, Adré.
So maps are not just lines on paper for us.
They are the language of space, and they reveal patterns, trends, connections, possibilities.
And some of the social dynamics we find are usually hidden or get slip by.
But we find that maps are, uh, they better our data.
They give us data that will enable us to look at exclusion and to do bottom up planning.
So, we saw the power of maps very early in our work, when women used a paper map and looked at and told us that in fact the toilet at the other end of the linear settlement was unusable for them, and so uh um, uh, it was virtually inaccessible.
Or when we drew a 15 minute walking city and we drew walk sheds around settlements and we realized, why don't women have the better jobs? Because they can only walk to work.
They don't have the motorcycles or the cycles to get to a much wider area.
When we started looking at community data, we realized that there is a need for this data to be seen by the government.
We developed a citizen, of course, Urba which is urban governance for short, we developed it with the city because we knew if we don't develop it with the city, the city is not going to like it or the city is not going to be able to use it.
But to start with the community, we developed a citizen app.
An application which enables the poorest and the most vulnerable people, including women or who may not have access to digital technology or smart skills to be able to talk, who may be uneasy, who may be uncomfortable, to be able to talk to the government through the citizen app, and they not just raise their voices, but they are also able to tell you the quality of the information.
They will tell you where these lighting is unsafe or where the male gaze is following them, and so therefore, there is a discomfort in using the toilet.
So it captures the qualitative information, but at the same time, it converts this qualitative information into actionable intelligence.
On the other side for the government, what it does is that it uses algorithms and these algorithms look at they are aligned to the government guidelines and the government guidelines, and so the government is able to see where are the gaps in services, where do we need to target services? It removes the subjectivity of the decision making, making it even more objective.
Um, uh, and, you know, what we found was that when we mapped and we saw the map which Samsuk showed that when we map the spatial boundaries of informal settlements, they become more than blank spaces, The infrastructure which divides infrastructure is it's not neutral, and infrastructure when it stops at the edge of your settlement, it defines that you are a citizen or you are not recognized.
What it does is that it uses these algorithms to actually take more effective and targeted decisions.
But just to, um, you know, uh, just to also say that Ergv is a very simple tool.
But it's also a very portable tool.
It can seamlessly be ported onto the other government systems and adaptable and it's low cost because it uses free source software.
And when it uses these free source, it actually democratizes the GIS for the local governments, for the cash strapped governments who can then use their own skills and this limited data to actually plan for the people.
Unbelievable.
A round of applause for the two speakers.
What a brilliant contribution and very complimentary.
Thank you so much.
So.
Thank you so much, Reno.
The next panel, it is my great pleasure to invite two ministers.
Firstly, Honorable Alice Mahome, Cabinet Secretary for L and, Public Works, Housing and Urban Development of Kenya to the stage.
Along with the Minister, I would like to invite Honorable Teil Milani, Minister of Human Settlements of South Africa.
Please a warm round of applause.
Minister, please.
So Firstly, I would like to congratulate honorable Minister from Kenya, Alice Vaho around the absolutely powerful Africa Urban forum that was held a couple of months ago.
If you weren't there, it was one of the most incredible convenings that brought together practitioners from the African continent to discuss urban issues, housing issues, and so on.
Congratulations, Minister, on that.
I have very easy questions for you, Minister.
As you know, you have an easy position working on public works, land and urban development.
So maybe start with something quite straightforward in terms of So the Kenyan Informal Settlement Improvement Program obviously has managed to reach a large number of municipalities in Kenya and has managed to leverage a substantial amount of resources from the World Bank.
I mean, the estimate is roughly around $350 million.
There has been a lot of intergovernmental coordination that has been required from your department and from the other divisions.
Maybe share with us a little bit about what this mixed financing and institutional frameworks between the different departments and the blending of the finance.
What are the kind of experiences that Kenya can share with us and what can be learned from it? Thank you.
Thank you very much for this opportunity to share the Kenyan experience on informal settlement.
I think the other word is slums.
We shy away from using the slum word.
When I was being vetted to become the Cabinet Secretary for ands, public Works, housing and urban development.
I was challenged by parliamentarians before getting the job because you get appointed by the head of state, but you must be vetted by your parliament.
They asked me, why do you have slum upgrading? Does it mean you don't want to eliminate the slums? Give us a better word.
I told them, of course, slums already exist.
If we start working on upgrading, then it means we have a strategy, find a way to eliminate.
I found myself in a corner because they wanted me to say we would stop the use of the word slum upgrading because they were uncomfortable with the word upgrading.
We have the Kenya informal settlement Improvement Program.
The settlement program has worked very well because the financing that we use is from World Bank, concessionary funding, but it wouldn't have worked without blending it with the land question.
As a gap that would provide a very critical percentage of the land and the land belonged to the community.
I listened very well to my sister.
I also listed to Professor Maria that the community participation is critical because the slums are already occupied by people.
People have been living there for generations, but the people living in the rums, and that is a quagmire of some sort, are not the owners of the structures.
When you start then using the funding, you now don't have four more titles, for more land documentation.
That becomes challenge, number one, because the World Bank and other institutions want to really have regularized documentation and it is important because even the people living there, if you are going to upgrade the homes they are living in, they want some documents to support their work because their input is critical.
I would see that as a branded financing because in Kenya, and it has been said in this Word Urban forum that land in Kenya is one of the most expensive land, I think world over.
For reasons that, of course, we have now more people demanding land and demanding housing than the provision or supply of housing.
The World Bank has come in very handy and the 350 million, what we do is that we register, we pick a slum.
We have over 1,100 slum settlements.
One, two, three to over 1,100.
Therefore, once we select a particular settlement or slum, then we negotiate with the people living within their houses the dwellings together with the owners now of the structures.
The owners of the structures don't want to go that route, but the people living in those houses want to be on board.
You start now having a challenge between the two groups and the owners of the structures have money because they have been collecting for years.
Therefore, they also fund protests and they fund disagreements and conflict between the slum dwellers.
We negotiate I want to give an example of, we have several that we are working on, including the largest slum, I think in Eastern Central Africa called Kibira.
We are working with the community there.
We are also working on Muku.
It's actually a Muku estate now.
We are calling it an estate now, but it's one of the largest slums and we are building 13,000 units using support from the World Bank.
What we did is to negotiate and register immediately, we started the project.
We enumerate, register the owners, the people living in the slums, and the owners of the structures.
And we negotiate, the owners of the structure also get considered and we give out, we value their investment and give them housing units.
Then the tenants who are the critical mass have the first option to take because we register them, we get all their data and they have the first option to take the units once we construct.
Of course, there is a waiting period and you have to move them and transfer them elsewhere or give them, we call it disturbance or displacement allowance.
Where then they are able to rent elsewhere and I suppose still in informal settlement, but they know the minute we finish, we have their data, we call them, and we give them the houses.
I would say that that funding, together with now the land that takes away about 30% of the cost of housing becomes very critical in the branded financing model.
I think that Lily is to say that if you come to Kenya and you have not visited Makuru, you may not understand our housing program.
The government, of course, therefore, is supporting that, working with World Bank and other partners in terms of slum upgrading and prevention.
Because as we do new houses, then other slums are also coming up elsewhere and it becomes a challenge.
I think going forward, we require greater investment, more a huge investment so that if we now get into alum like Muku we are able to do 13,000 in the shortest time possible, of course, then therefore means we need new technology that will save on time of construction, new technology that will also maybe use better materials, green building materials, and also possibly in that also cut the cost downward just as another way of maybe saying you are trying to finance because the critical issue of financing remains a challenge for every state and therefore, maybe I shouldn't go beyond that, but we do have success story in terms of our slum upgrading.
Bira or Saj, So Moyo, or Maku and it goes on.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Minister.
Round of applause for the minister, please.
I think in many ways you framed the question.
Of course, I shouldn't leave without saying that other than now the World Bank money, we have a levy.
I will finish with this.
We have a housing Levy Act, which we established or enacted in 2024, we passed through a lot of challenges including litigation from the public, but we are able to now use the levy from Kenyans, which is lead the domestic solution to financing.
That has given us a leverage.
It may not be sufficient, but it has given us theory about one third of the money we need per annum to do 200,000 units per year, and that is our target.
With the legislative framework and regulatory framework, we are able to fund, and this is basically local funding, and I think that it has done a great job for our affordable housing program.
We, of course, still need to think of other solutions to funding because as I say, it's about one third, and then you put about another one third from the land.
You now come like 50% of subsidized funding.
Thank you.
So a true example of blended finance.
I mean, your question and your comments really link up to what I wanted to ask Minister milane as well.
Obviously, South Africa has a long tradition and history of how and been a long champion of NC two incremental upgrading and choosing this over resettlement.
Perhaps you could also speak a little bit about I know there have been some changes in the financial instruments in South Africa around funding informal settlements.
What I really would like to ask you is perhaps shed some light on how do we mobilize the finance at scale for informal settlement upgrading and what remains the hardest gap to close when we talk about funding for this particular program, Minister, please.
Thank you very much and good morning to my sister as well.
Look, we've got a mixed blended financing structure which is dependent on our fiscal through various grant system, which will be funding, for example, your rental stock in the creation of the mixed development, which will be funding your what we call PNG program where we break the new ground.
It's informed by trying to close the gap and bringing dignity in relation to our racial past, which had discrimination in terms of spatial injustice.
We provide houses for free to the vulnerable, mainly the elderly, people with disabilities and child headed household.
Of course, we've got a challenge and a mix now in the back in relation to our policy is to respond to young and unemployed.
Of course, we've got a bank of what we call the gap market, people who do not qualify for the BNG which is the free allocated house by the state.
They may be employed, but maybe at a general labor entry.
Employment level, they do not necessarily get covered by the commercial banks in terms of being able to afford a housing bond.
And then we have the National Housing Finance Corporation, which therefore ranges between the amount of about 3,500 to about 22,000.
A good working relationship with our commercial banks which have extended that bracket to about 35,000, and it mostly cares for first home financing, when the name of the program.
I think we need to rethink, of course, in our policy then in covering the young unemployed but may not necessarily be fitting into the category of the vulnerable.
Yes, we accept that being unemployed also bring vulnerabilities, but we provide safe distance at the cost of government where we put the infrastructure and you may be able to develop over time.
But obviously, the programs that we have bring a challenge or an opportunity for us to work towards the blending financing in relation to the private sector.
We've made some wins.
We wish it could have been more.
For example, in our social housing, a partnership where we will be creating the rental stock, also we will have funding either coming through a developer jointly with government and a commercial bank to create quite a number of units in an accelerated.
The key cost driver in our finance model would have been lend.
We've been unable to unlock quite a bit of government lend through our Sister Department of Public Works, you at least try to minus the cost of purchase of end but rather utilize.
We're aiming now secondly that mix of the financial bank to look into old government buildings or unused or which could be rehabilitated, particularly for our housing stock.
I think the key challenge which we may really want to ponder and find a decision on is we view housing only or human settlement only as a housing response, while it can be a catalytic towards economic growth.
Much as you would have afforded, we've built almost 5 million houses, we're still city with over 4,000 informal settlements.
Meaning, yes, you may be progressing, but the need is growing.
There is now close correlation between people who have received houses in semi urban and rural areas who now move to urban areas because of economic opportunities that they desire in the areas that are developed and you can't fund them again, which means that creates a cycle in your informal settlement database or growth.
Therefore, that means we need to move outside of the social sector, but also getting into, into the economic at last and ensuring that we drive development through human settlement, which provides economic development, which are also centered around convenience of what people could be able to do in a house that would have been provided by the state.
I see you're nodding a lot.
Maybe let me stop there.
There were two points I wanted to cover, but I'm sure I will respond to them.
Later on, please.
No, no.
I actually to maybe just this last one.
To say the institute development, which was part of what you have been able to drive, is what informed us one in knowing the informal settlements that we have and be able to number them.
But two, beyond assessment and saying, what are they or where are they, we've began to realize that most of them are in the urban edge of the cities, closer to where convenience and development is.
But they are in areas where you actually may not necessarily be able to build in suit or to upgrade in suit.
The wetlands, the intmatic lands because any vacant space or land that is there gets to be utilized without the permission of government.
You may call disaster a silver lining because engaging our communities takes pretty longer if you say to them, hey, this land is not a habitable move.
They feel no government is evicting us.
It doesn't want to understand that there is a need for us to be closer and that is why you need business because most of them are closer to industries are closer to factories.
Some are on top of government infrastructure like bat pipes or sanitation pipes.
Which makes development in Stu a bit difficult.
That gives us a challenge of saying we now need to relocate them and move them to areas where we have zoned them, create formalized settlements, and were deliberate and intentional on where people needs to stay.
The biggest challenge is most of the land, for example, in Aguin the surrounding land about 40, 50 kilometers outside the urban edge of the towns and the secondary cities, it's either private land or is utilized land, which makes it difficult for the development and the upgrades, and it wants us to look into the partnerships that we can run with business to bring people closer so we minimize their cost coming from transportation, for example, to move to urban areas on a day to day basis.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Round of applause for both the ministers, please.
Ministers, thank you so much.
I hope you're able to stay around for the next set of contributions because I think we have some ideas that may help with what may happen.
Thank you, Minister.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The next panel, we're going to call four speakers together.
I'm going to first call Grasa Javier.
Grasa is an old comrade who's worked with us for many years on upgrading programs in Brazil.
She's worked with women.
She's a lawyer in training in human rights and also since the age of 14, she's working with many movements in Brazil to help around housing.
The next speaker on the panel is doctor Sarah Sabri, who works as the Global Urban Lead for Save the Children and is the chair of the Global Alliance for Cities for Children.
Welcome, sir.
With this, I would also like to invite Engineer Khat Siddiq to the stage.
He's the chairman of the Urban Development Fund based in Egypt.
Welcome, Khalit.
Last but not the least, all the way from Japan, I would like to invite Professor Akiko Okabe, a professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo.
The question with doctor Sarah Sabri, if that's okay.
Sarah, you have a long history of working with children, particularly in informal settlements.
300 to 500 million children living in informal settlements today.
And describe to us just briefly what would designing for children in informal settlements look like and how does it matter? How does it situate itself in the rest of the settlement, in the neighborhood, in the city, please Thank you very much.
Like this.
Hello.
Hello.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I have one that works.
Maybe this figure keeps coming up and the official one is somewhere 350-500 million children are growing up in slums and informal settlements around the world.
This is not a small number.
This is one out of four urban children if we look at a global average.
But if we look at the African continent, for example, we find that one out of two urban children is growing up in a slum, sometimes two out of three urban children, and sometimes three out of four urban children depending on the country and the city.
It's pretty generic in terms of how much childhood is experienced in a slum.
Now, let me just take one step back from that and say children in general are not included are not central in city planning in general.
It's not only in slums and informal settlements, which are generally not planned, but overall in the city.
If we wanted to plan for children in slums, we have to first plan for them widely in the city city wide as, um, you know, various other speakers have said we need citywide plans looking at spatial elements.
Where are the children located? What are their biggest needs? Where are the biggest assets we can mobilize? What stakeholders we need to get together to address the immediate needs of children, whether it's exceptional levels of malnutrition in slums or children that are out of school in slums, and so on and so forth.
First of all, we need to make a plan that involves needs, assets, stakeholders, database lines citywide, and then neighborhood wide.
Now, if we make a plan for children in the city, we have to consult in the informal settlement, in the slum, with caregivers, with children, especially when it comes to small children.
We have to be putting caregivers at the center of that because you want to make caregivers lives much easier, especially for small children so that they can provide the nurturing childhoods and nurturing relationships and nurturing care that are needed for small children.
80% of a child's brain grows in the first three years of life.
If a caregiver is stressed and is trying to get access to water and sanitation and all of that, they're unable to provide nurturing care required.
Secondly, we have to listen to children themselves, especially older children, girls, boys, all children, children with disabilities, migrant and displaced children.
Really, all children have to be at the center of that.
We need to look at immediate needs.
When we think of slum upgrading, often we think of something that will happen in the future in a few years.
But there are immediate needs of children that have to be addressed in addition to the longer needs.
Finally, yes, the home is the base when we talk about housing at this World Urban Forum, but homes are neighborhoods children move in neighborhoods.
They go to schools.
We have to think of a school zone, a safe and active journey to school, school playgrounds, spaces where children move.
We have to think of early childhood facilities, and so on and so forth.
With that, I'm going to say, why does it matter for everyone in the settlement to think of children? As we heard You know, the vast majority of city populations today are quite young.
If we're not planning for them, then we're pretty much not planning for a very significant part of the population.
If children's needs are taken care of, it makes the caregivers lives much easier, especially mothers who can then work and contribute to household income.
Everything that works for children makes it easier for everyone.
Safer, cleaner, greener streets, waste that's looked after, makes it better for everyone.
As we always say at Save the Children and at the Global Alliance cities for Children, we're available to support cities to make a citywide plan for children, but specifically for children residing in slums and informal settlements because cities that work for children usually work for everyone and for the planet as well.
Thank you.
Round of applause for Sarah.
Sarah, I would really encourage you and encourage all of you.
If you haven't seen it, the Baku Call to Action Zero draft is available on the Wo website.
We've had incredible inputs from some of the youth and children organization, but also from some of the activists.
So thank you so much for that input.
Akiko, I think this input from Sara relates directly to some of the work that you've been doing.
We know that tenure security is a very important issue in informal settlements and you've had incredible experience in super micro projects that have had quite a transformative macro impact in informal settlements.
Maybe share with us some of these experiences and link it up a little bit towards how we leverage this in the conversations around the new urban agenda midterm review and how tenure security relates back to informal settlements.
Thank you, A.
Thanks to this invitation, I could visit this beautiful big city of Bgu.
I'm working with people in informal settlements because I'm confident that their lifestyle give us hope for the future of our planet.
In effect, as you said, I do super modest projects, always aspiring for super macro change, but it is not easy.
And your project, land tenure has been always an obstacle.
Slums emerging in well located areas with good access to work are often situated in river banks in Asia and steep slopes in Latin America, where construction itself is restricted.
In these cases, individual land titling doesn't work well, but not necessarily eviction is the only solution.
New an agenda states that cities and human settlements should fulfill their social functions, as the executive director mentioned, including the social and ecological function of land.
And, once harmonized is not a privilege, but a shared resource for all.
Even if adequate housing for individual households is impossible, adequate communal living could be possible.
A shift from individual to communal is required.
However, careful efforts that we have already shared in this dialogue that respect bottom up initiatives of poor communities are complicated and take time in a world where neoliberal economic development for one hand, is accelerating.
Practitioners and policymakers often feel powerless.
In this regard, the Venezuelan experience is significant.
It is not so well known.
The constitution defines popular power and self governing communes.
People in communes feel that they are driving their country and they may change the world, the whole world.
Thus, they begin to take amazing actions to proactively solve local problems.
This is supported by participatory budgeting in Venezuela.
Admitting that it is in a peculiar case under extreme geopolitical circumstances, still, it looks like a miracle for policymakers and practitioners.
When the community assumes the responsibility in managing lands, even the land is not regularized, why not government introduce formal tools for improving physical environment living in the community? Here lies the prosperous way for scaling up.
Amazing.
Thank you so much.
Can we have a round of applause for Akiko, please? If you haven't, you should please go and check out Akiko's work.
It's really transformative and very impactful.
Our next speaker, engineer Khalid Siddiq.
From Egypt's perspective, the national government has had a model that has looked at slums from the government perspective and produced a vision 2030.
Perhaps share with us a little bit what have been the main results out of this program and how did the top down process of government implementing these processes interact with some of the community processes from the bottom up? What I'm So I will be speaking in Arabic.
When it comes to developing slums in Egypt, it was a very strong experience.
So when we started working in that, we looked and we saw that there is a very difficult cause, 357 areas that are in very difficult situations, 270,000 families.
Where around 1,000,000.5 people are living.
So these are very prone to diseases or unstable life or a lot of other challenges and difficulties.
So we had a central plan when it comes to central, it doesn't mean only the fund, but a centralized approach that works with the local governments and how do we have an executive plan? This executive plan is implemented in cooperation with all the districts, departments, authorities that exist.
So we started working on this.
And so we worked together so that we accelerate the work on it.
Another thing that we need to take care of this wasn't only just constructing communities and housing communities, but also it requires other services, as in educational, cultural, and also security as well.
A third thing How in cooperating and working on all the projects that we are working on, how do we cooperate with different authorities and ministries and departments that we are working on through this? It is very important to work on the human instead of just the construction.
This is something that is taken very importantly into account and it's not just to put people in houses and that's it, but how to educate the children and how to look at the behaviors or the lifestyles of those people living in those slums.
But we know that a child will be constructing a new society, a new community, and how to equip this child to have a good future and to live decently.
All of this work cost Egypt $3 billion.
Since we started working from 2016 until 2021, we have other causes as well in terms of slums and informal settlements.
But this was the main topic for us to keep the safety and security of people living there.
And then when we achieved this objective, we started implementing that in the centralized planning and thinking and working, and then we started distributing that work through the different districts so that they can implement at the local level.
When it comes to government financing or the state financing, we turned this fund from a service fund to an economic fund.
Inside of that, We had the same service service provided, but also we looked into the way we were putting money into these projects so that we can have a return on it so that we can look at the other challenges that need also our expenditure.
The income that we had contributed highly to 45% of our self revenue coming from the fund so that it contributes also to the state expenditure and we are hoping to get to 100% when we achieve the first phase from this urban development fund.
Now we are looking into how to contribute this revenue into 100% taking up the challenges that we are facing right now and we are hoping for a better future.
Thank you very much.
The powerful message that housing isn't just about the four walls and a roof, it is much more than that and it has to be integrated into a whole system in the neighborhood, in the city, and so on.
Last but not least, Grasa, an easy question for you.
You work is consistently highlighted in upgrading programs, the role of women, the importance of centering it around women, around Afro Brazilian communities, around acknowledging race, around acknowledging class, and the many tensions that exist in informal settlements.
But perhaps speak to us, how do we ensure that informal settlements do not reproduce the exclusion that we're trying to fight in our society.
Bon Bon.
Good morning.
First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation by the Executive Director, Anna Claudia.
Turns out she's a Brazilian as well.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to bring the experience of Brazil to the World Urban Forum.
I would like to start by saying something that is very important.
It's something I normally say the house is open door for the other rides.
From the house.
When you have a house, when you have a roof, your horizon is broadened and people really get to think not only about the house and the hope but think in a collective manner.
Think in the collective, in the community in Brazil, 8%, that is to say, more than 16 million people live in the informal economy, in informal settlements.
And all this lack of houses led us to making investments in the participatory process, the democratic process.
Thinking of different solutions and also proposing different measures to the governments, both state level and the national government.
How to move forward, how to improve the quality of life of these people that live in the informal settlements, right? Also working with the informal economy.
That's why I tend to say this word because it's in my head.
What else? Well, I live in a place called Raji Silesi in the state of Sao Paolo and there we started a project consisting of organizing and public advocacy, different institutes and universities are involved and we created the first housing complex that is regulated, urbanized, with different documents that support it.
From there onwards, it became a real experience and it became a benchmark for Brazil.
So we work not only in the regularization process, but in 2019, Brazil chose a precedent, and it turns out that then soon after COVID arrived and many people were kicked out of their homes during that period.
And we distinguish between two periods, one, which is more administrative with the local authorities, et cetera.
People living in those spaces and speculation also became bigger and stronger.
They took their families out of the places where they were living.
What we do about that? What did we do about that? We started with the campaign during that period.
Then the other type is about more the legal pathway, which is the most classical one.
It's related to the rights, to the law, et cetera.
In this campaign, we made all the universities, institutes, NGOs, trade unions involved.
Thanks to that, we got a mapping of all these realities and we found out, well, we detected and we confirmed that most of them were women.
That were in charge of their families, Black women.
So from then onwards, we provided more visibilities to this process.
And then from all this research that was carried out by us, we got to suspend almost all these force displacements.
So then from that reality, they served as a legal reference, and then all the force displacements were suspending from the pandemic period.
And this was due to our fight, the fight of the popular movements, the fights led by us.
So today, We are involved in this process of organization mobilization, not only at grassroots level, but we have created a real network and we want the families to remain there and that With it is important to say that Lula's government facilitated this process.
He acknowledged these realities and he provided funding for the people living in precarious situation so that they could actually get legal resources and some funds were mobilized and the idea is that people could have a decent life.
Thank you.
Speakers.
I'm going to hand back to Nas.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Ady.
Thank you to the speakers.
I'd like to call up now David Dodman who is the Gender Director for the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
Thank you.
I'll sit here.
Thank you.
Thanks, and good morning.
Do you want me to sit down? Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
We're going to just really briefly reflect on the four sessions and dialogues that we just heard from.
We're going to hear some key takeaways from David and Ady as we wrap up this session.
David, you're obviously listening in to all of that.
Just some key takeaways, please.
Of course, thanks and good morning again.
It's a very inspiring dialogue with a rare mixture, I think, of a big picture and detailed insight that was incredibly wide ranging.
Um, I think we have a very clear sense of the need and the reason for transforming informal settlements, the demographic priority, the fact that it's the norm in so many cities.
But I think also the way that we looked through the cards and this being something that makes it very real.
We talk in abstract terms about housing or informal settlements, and we can't forget that we're talking about homes and neighborhoods and communities, that these are places that are sites for work, and their sites of community as Grassa just said, their sites of care where people look after children and the people and the things that matter to them.
I think the choice of the word for transforming informal settlements and moving away from eliminating or even upgrading to transforming is a different way of thinking which is very important.
From the various inputs, I think it became also very clear that there's no single way to transform.
We hear about self build exercises, we hear about large scale public housing, we hear about titling in its various forms.
None of these on their own is appropriate everywhere.
The context matters.
We heard from Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Thailand, India.
It's also very clear that transforming informal settlements can't be done through one sector alone.
It's interesting we started with Minister Jabarv, the Minister of Economy, also that we hear about finance and that Mr.
Sadik mentioned the importance of education and culture.
We talk about planning or climate change, we talk about digital issues and AI mega trends.
So there's no single sector they need to be brought together.
What I had hoped to do was come up with two or three key principles, and I only managed to keep it to five, which I'll go through as briefly as I can.
The first is the links with the economy, decent work, social protection.
As Minister Simlane talked about the importance of transforming informal settlements as being catalytic to economic growth.
We talked about finance, the different models from the ISP model from Cabinet Secretary Wahome to the Urban Development Fund in Egypt model.
We talked about the importance of collaboration and co production.
I was struck by Marie's words about the correct form of state intervention and Socks words about collaborative working mechanisms.
I was struck by an important principle of taking into account location, structure, and services.
The way that Dan maps as Renau talked about, can highlight these connections.
We talked about, and I think the key principle is the centrality of residents.
Some talked about demand led and community driven interventions.
We talked to them, Sarah talked about planning and designed for children, taking into account the needs for migrants, displaced people, and people with disabilities.
Grasa really highlighted as we close the centrality of women's experiences and that of different ethnic groups.
If we bear these principles of economy, finance, location, collaboration, and the centrality of residence, I think we begin to have some very useful lessons for how we can transform informal settlements.
Thank you, David.
You've done a brilliant job of summing up those four sessions.
I hope you've been taking notes.
I think it's excellent.
Ay, I just wanted to ask you If you were to take one commitment, and we heard a few commitments there from any act in the room, which one would you say would most change the trajectory of informal settlement transformation in the next five years? Sure.
That's a very difficult question to answer.
I guess I would pick based on my own experience in working with informal settlements, citywide community led.
That's what the commitment should be.
We cannot do it this project by project.
It has to be an institutional shift that looks at the entire city and the entire system in its holistic nature.
Thanks.
Brilliant.
Thank you so much to Ay and to David.
Sadly, we've come to the end of today's dialogue.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I really have to say it's probably one of the most important dialogues here in Baku during this week and my sincere thanks to all our speakers, partners, and organizers, of course, the wonderful interpreters who do a great job over there as well.
Look, today's discussion, I would say, reminds us that informal settlements are not failures of people.
They are the failures of policy, investment, and inclusion.
We heard clearly that different futures are possible, and I think the Baku call to action is a first step, but consensus is just the first step.
We need to move forward with more and more action.
Thank you very much to everyone here in the room and to all of you online listening in.
Thank you and have a great day.