Donors urged to shell out $200m to halve urban poverty by 2021

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A Z M Anas The donor community should cough up at least US$210 million to help Bangladesh halve the number of poor living in urban areas by 2021, a top urban poverty practitioner said Wednesday. "It's not a pipe dream. It's doable," Azahar Ali, who coordinates a six-year $120 million project to fight urban poverty, told the FE. "It's an issue of urgency. Our rapid urbanisation process makes it a powerful case why donors should step up engagement in the still-overlooked area," he said. The Urban poor make up 26 per cent of the total poor in the country and Mr Ali said a yearly investment of $30 million could help halve the number of urban population that is poor. His appeal comes at a time when the anti-urban poverty programme, touted as the world's largest, is salted for closure in August next year. Mr. Ali, who has over two decades of development experience, said the UK-aided Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction (UPPR) progrmme is going on to help pull 3.0 million urban poor up by their own bootstraps by 2014. UPPR officials, however, say no study was yet carried out to gauge how many urbanites climbed out of poverty since the inception of the programme in 2008. Under the programme, slum dwellers form community development groups, micro-save and get financial lifeline for skills development, education and small business start-ups. It also provide water and sanitation facilities, build footpaths construction, and drains within squatting settlements. So far, more than 40,000 improved cooking stoves have been handed out to the slum residents in 24 cities and towns across the country, UPPR data showed. At an annualised 3.7 per cent, the World Bank said Bangladesh's urban population growth is higher than any other countries in south Asia, except Nepal. Urban populations have swelled from 5.0 per cent in 1971 to a 27 per cent in 2008, suggesting an estimated 44 million people are currently living in urban areas. Economists say rural-urban movement is powering the urbanisation process as more and more rural folks keep streaming into cities, either encouraged by employment opportunities or compelled by natural disasters. But the majority of the new arrivals end up in shantytowns where the living conditions are squalid and often much worse than rural habitats. Unlike their non-slum counterparts, shack dwellers don't have ownership over land and are denied basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity supply and waste management. A top demographer at ICDDR,B (International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh) Peter Kim Streatfield predicted that much of future urban growth in Bangladesh will be among slum dwelling populations. Referring to the case of Dhaka, he said the growth rate of the capital slums is about twice that of the city itself. In Dhaka, Mr Streatfield, who heads the Centre for Population, urbanisation and Climate Change at the ICDDR,B, said the current slum population as a proportion of the total urban population is 37 per cent-higher than the national figures. Dr. Hossain Zillur Rahman, an economist and a former caretaker advisor, dubbed urban poverty an "emerging policy priority", but said it is yet to attain the required policy level engagement. Mr Ali, of UPPR, said the international community should continue to plough resources into urban poverty reduction in Bangladesh that aspires to join the rank of a middle-income nation by 2021. "Middle-income status will remain elusive if the urban poor are bypassed the potential economic boom," the former WaterAid official said.