1.2 Sanitation and urban slums
1.2.1 Urban slums
About 900 million people were considered slum dwellers in the
world in 2005 (Garau
et al., 2005); this represents about one third of urban dwellers
in developing countries. Combined to the high birth rate in these countries,
emigration from rural areas is the major growth factor in developing cities,
with immigrants choosing to turn away from their isolation in hope of better
education and jobs. However, municipalities are often not prepared to welcome
this mass influx, resulting in unplanned and often «illegal»
settlements. 78% of urban citizens are slum dwellers in the least developed
countries. UN-Habitat (2003) estimates that there would be 1.5 billion slum
dwellers by 2020. However, poverty reduction strategies are still largely
focused on rural development, according to Mitlin (2004), and municipalities
treat slums at best by ignoring them, but
2 Out of 500 respondents in a PHAST survey
also by seeing them as a «problem» or by bulldozing
them (Garau et al., 2005). Two
common approaches have been tried since the late 1960s, slum
upgrading and housing finance systems. Slum upgrading is often done at small
scale, unable to reach most of
the slum dwellers; housing financing systems often comprise
«inappropriate conditions for the slum dwellers» (ibid.).
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have set target 11, which
proposes
«by 2020, improving substantially the lives of at least 100
million slum dwellers, while providing adequate alternatives to slum
formation.»
which is a twofold challenge, as it addresses both issues of
present slums and future housing policies. Most recent operational
recommendations comprise the recognition of slum dwellers as active agents of
development, improvements of governance, supporting pro-poor policies and
empowering local actions (ibid.).
1.2.2 Sanitation in slums
Millennium Development Goal 7, target 10 states:
«Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without
sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.»
If the world population without access to safe drinking was
around 1.1 billion in 2000, there were 2.4 billion without access to sanitation
according to WHO-UNICEF (2000). Poor sanitation is responsible for the
propagation of feacal-oral diseases, such as diar- rhoea (4 billion cases
annually and 2.2 million deaths) or intestinal worms (ibid.). It is estimated
that water, sanitation and hygiene interventions can reduce diarrhoeal
diseases
by one quarter to one third (ibid.).
The urban poor, and especially the children, are known to be more
at risk (Mara,
1996a). But sanitation interventions are harder to conduct in
slums: high population densities mean that many technological options are not
feasible; slums are often situ- ated on low-value land, such as flood-prone
areas or unstable hill slopes; high levels
of poverty mean that the beneficiaries' contribution or
willingness to pay would be low and a project would have to invest more for the
same result.
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