13th Commission on Sustainable Development for water, sanitation and human settlements |
Shacks and hotels: Uganda's capital city, Kampala, illustrates that urbanisation brings wealth to cities, but that the urban poor do not always benefit from it and have no choice but to live in poor quality housing in low-income settlements.
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The thirteenth session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-13) met at UN Headquarters in New York from 11 to 22 April 2005. CSD-13 built upon the outcome of CSD-12 and sought to adopt policy decisions on practical measures and options to better develop water, sanitation and human settlements.
Homeless International and ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group, now known as Practical Action) worked together to produce a briefing paper designed to influence discussions on key urban development themes at CSD-13.
Homeless International's Community Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF), and its support for our Indian partner SPARC's community-led approach to sanitation, resettlement and upgrading, were profiled in documentation produced by other organisations for the CSD-13 meeting. CLIFF was described as a "…precedent for a mechanism by which official donor agencies can support community-driven processes…" in a booklet commissioned by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). The booklet also highlighted the effectiveness of the Indian Alliance's strategies for community-led resettlement, upgrading and infrastructure development. You can download the booklet by clicking on this link to WSSCC's website (625KB).
CLIFF was also profiled in a booklet entitled 'The challenge of financing sanitation for meeting the Millennium Development Goals', commissioned by the Norwegian government and produced by the Water and Sanitation Program for the previous CSD meeting, CSD-12, in 2004. You can download this 455KB document by clicking here.
CSD-13 subsequently adopted a range of measures related to human settlements (which you can find out more about by clicking here). It recognised that land and housing development were intimately linked to achieving targets for improved water and sanitation provision – a link that has often been ignored in the past. The declaration reiterated the importance of "Access to affordable land, housing and basic services" and included several lessons from CLIFF and related experiences as means to achieve this:
- Designing pro-poor policies, with a focus on tenure security and access to affordable serviced land.
- Targeting subsidies to poor people for housing and basic services, including the consideration of loans and subsidies that reflect the payment capabilities of the poor for housing and basic services.
- Strengthening the capital base and building the financial capacity of community savings and micro- finance institutions serving the poor.
