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	Banding together to meet the challenges of urban poverty by Celine d’Cruz and Sheela Patel Slum Dwellers International India   February 2012   One of the more promising developments in the effort to reduce urban poverty is the emergence of networks of grassroots groups in which women play a prominent role as agents of positive change in their communities and around the world.   We have had the privilege of working with one such network – Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) – since its inception in 1996. There are similar networks of street vendors, home-based workers and waste pickers.   We believe that unless we band together, the challenges of urban poverty will not be addressed. By joining forces and pooling our knowledge, experience and creative solutions, we can achieve action on a meaningful scale.   So it is that slum dwellers in such cities as Nairobi, Kenya, and Kampala, Uganda, are consulting counterparts in Mumbai, India, who persuaded government, railway authorities and international development lenders to relocate some 20,000 households as part of an effort to update the rail system.   Ultimately, the Mumbai slum residents were able to design their own resettlement, moving from locations where many children had been killed by trains passing a mere 9 metres from homes.   SDI has hundreds of thousands of federated members in cities spread across 34 countries.   They work for decent housing and infrastructure, usually seeking to collaborate with local government. This takes years of organizing, mobilizing and building relationships.   It begins when women form collectives to pool savings and make loans to one another so they can put food on the table, buy medicines, get transport to find jobs and pay for children’s education. In time, they examine their environs and identify what they need.   At the top of the list of needs is security of tenure. Children need a decent place to live, places to play and neighbourhoods in which they feel safe. They need clean water and toilet solutions that do not force two-year-olds to stand in line or expose adolescent girls to harassment. Security of tenure makes it easier to fulfil these needs.   It also frees children from the stress and lost opportunities that come with the ever-present threat of being forcibly evicted or having their homes demolished. Insecurity of tenure means that women and children must work near their dwellings so they are close at hand in case of eviction.   Children serve as ‘road runners’, warning parents and neighbours when a demolition squad has been sighted; as their homes are destroyed, they scramble to protect whatever they can from being taken by the police. Living in constant fear of eviction erodes whatever resources a family has.   But when secure tenure is negotiated, children start going to school, and parents feel more confident about investing in proper shelter.   Here, too, the experience of grassroots networks is instructive. An essential element of SDI’s work is making what was invisible hard to ignore. Cities often have no data recording the presence of people living ‘illegally’ on pavements, under bridges and on waste land. These residents are not counted in the census; they are excluded from voting lists; and their children’s births are not recorded.   But when their presence is documented through settlement profiles and family identification papers, it becomes clear that they are gainfully employed, contribute to the city’s economy and are worthy of citizenship.   Because such documentation also identifies the children in each household, it becomes possible to determine how many need immunization and schooling, how many work and what kind of work they do. In addition to being our basic organizing tool, this process of enumeration enables negotiation for tenure and service provision. The process yields another benefit for children – seeing parents, especially their mothers, negotiate collectively to improve lives and surroundings is a vital part of children’s socialization.   Clearly, these networks cannot solve the problems of all children. But they are important allies in the endeavour to safeguard child rights, and they undertake critical foundational work to make children’s homes and neighbourhoods safe and secure.   They can bridge the gap between the formal urban development world and poor urban communities, promoting solutions that work for their members. We know from our work that poor communities are fed up with others setting development priorities for them. True alliances and partnerships mean making choices together.   (Sheela Patel chairs the board of Slum Dwellers International (SDI). Celine d’Cruz is the coordinator of SDI. She has worked for the rights of pavement and slum dwellers in India since the early 1980s, helping impoverished women in Mumbai bargain collectively to bring housing, education and health services to their families). Visit the related web page
	Countries must invest in food security strategies to reduce poverty by David Nabarro UN Special Representative on Food Security   2 March 2012   Governments need to prioritize food security strategies and invest in their agricultural sectors to reduce poverty, a senior United Nations official said, stressing that supporting small farmers was particularly important to prevent food crises.   David Nabarro, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition, told a news briefing in Geneva that one of the main challenges the world faces today is ensuring that it can meet the demand for food for nine billion people by 2050.   To tackle this challenge, he said, countries should focus on making sure that they have the necessary measures in place to be able to provide food for their population. However, this has become more complex in recent years due to volatile food prices.   During 2007 and 2008, rises in food prices triggered a crisis which saw riots in more than 35 countries as prices soared by as much as 50 per cent and at least 700 million people suffered from hunger. Since then, prices have remained inconsistent due to uncertainty in the world economy as well as changes in demand and shortage of supplies.   Mr. Nabarro, who coordinates the High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, said one of the UN’s priorities was to continue to sustain efforts in the 22 countries that experience recurring food crises, such as Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and parts of Uganda and northern Tanzania.   He also stated that one the main lessons learned by the international community in the past years was that repeated bursts of humanitarian aid were not the answer to help these countries in the long term. Instead, funding for programmes that increase their resilience and investing in small farmers, who produce most of the food in Africa, proved to be a better strategy.   He highlighted that long-term investment in Ethiopia had meant it had been more successful in providing a safety net to its citizens, while in Kenya poor infrastructure had hindered the ability to move food from plentiful to drought-hit areas, he noted. In Somalia a general lack of access led to famine being declared, and communities were still trying to recover.   Mr. Nabarro underlined that the Task Force, comprising the heads of more than 20 UN departments, will continue to engage with these countries and will pay particular attention to fighting malnourishment in children and increasing communities’ resilience to climate change. Visit the related web page
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