Slum dwellers, youth, city-wide planning and accelerating urban service delivery

The New Urban Agenda calls for an urban paradigm shift to change the way cities and human settlements are planned, built, governed and managed. One part of this is effective decentralisation, strengthening urban governance and management. This side event addresses these issues head-on through reflection on long-term programmes, with a focus on mainstreaming the voices of slum dwellers, and improving their access to basic services, comparing approaches and including a range of marginalised groups and of youth.
 
Practical Action will present the findings from national and regional evaluations of a 4-year process working with nearly 33,000 slum dwellers across 82 slums in 6 cities in Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. This included city-wide approaches engaging with every slum community in three of these cities, improving relationships and making progress on appropriate forms of service delivery in water, sanitation and waste management.
 
In Kenya, Practical Action has worked with the Bartlett Centre for Development Planning to assess our work on inclusive planning and access to water. They have both evaluated our work, and run fieldwork courses with Masters Students to explore the effectiveness and impact of our work in Kisumu for three consecutive years. They present their findings of the changes in relationships between communities and the local authority, and the challenges of delivering services equally across informal settlements.
 
Finally World Vision bring an emphasis on youth and the informal sector through discussion of their work in Kariobangi and Korogocho slums in Nairobi. They have demonstrated a decentralised approach for services delivery, specifically in waste management. The project has worked with youth groups, building their entrepreneurial skills to improve waste management and for the creation of safer and healthier public spaces. The session ends with reflection on how these experiences inform implementation of the New Urban Agenda and SDG11.