Meeting the MDGS in Urban Areas: The Forgotten Role of Local Organizations

Local government organizations have great importance for low-income urban dwellers. They influence whether low-income households can send their children to school (or whether they can afford to keep them there) and whether they can get health care when they are ill or injured. Whether their homes get connected to water, sanitation and drainage networks. Whether they can get land on which they can build their own homes or whether they have to build illegally--often on dangerous sites (because they would be evicted from any safer site). Whether they can avoid having their settlements bulldozed. Whether they can vote and can get access to politicians and civil servants. Whether they get protection from violence and other crimes. Whether they can set up their own small enterprises and whether they can get loans to help them do so. Whether they can affect development projects. Other organizations will also influence these circumstances; for instance, in many nations, local offices of provincial or national government organizations, private enterprises or non-governmental organizations (NGO) are significant players. But local government organizations and their policies, procedures and regulations are important determinants of what services are provided and who can access them. Local governments in urban areas, therefore, have great relevance in the progress toward most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as illustrated in Table 1. This is not simply an issue of whether local governments have the resources and capacities to support the meeting of these goals; it is also a question of what they choose to prioritize and to ignore. In many cities in low- and middle-income nations, the fact that 30 to 60 percent of the population live in illegal settlements with very inadequate or no provision for water, sanitation, schools and health care has as much to do with local governments choosing not to address the problems as it does with a lack of capacity and resources. This paper will provide examples of local governments that became more effective at meeting the MDGs with little or no external support through changing their priorities and the way they worked with poor urban communities and their organizations. Local governments also influence the extent to which urban-poor groups are able to pursue their livelihoods and develop their housing without harassment. Whether the MDGs will be met in urban areas will be much influenced by local government attitudes--which are often anti-squatter, anti-migrant and anti-hawker. One of the results of such anti-poor attitudes is the forced eviction of millions of low-income individuals each year--leaving them homeless and often injured by the violence of the eviction. This destroys not only their homes but often their only asset base. It usually also compromises their livelihoods and breaks up their social networks. Local governments typically justify these evictions for "the public good" or to support city development, yet they create or exacerbate poverty and counter progress toward the MDGs. (1) Examples in this paper will also show how partnerships between urban-poor organizations and local governments can resolve the need to improve and extend infrastructure within cities and support city development without forced evictions. The local organizations formed by the urban poor themselves also have great relevance in whether or not the MDGs are met. This relevance is both through their influence on local governments' actions and through these organizations' own capabilities. In many nations, representative organizations formed by urban-poor groups have demonstrated new ways to build and improve homes and to improve provisions for water, sanitation, drainage and solid-waste collection that are cheaper and of better quality than conventional government or private-sector provisions. Many have demonstrated how to do this in ways in which women have central roles in decision-making and implementation, or in ways that allow the poorest to be included. …