Refugees and other migrants are part of the global workforce of essential workers responding to the COVID-19 pandemic: every day they save lives and contribute to our economies and societies. Yet their contributions can be hidden, their skills undervalued, and their rights denied. These examples of reforms, new initiatives, and campaigns to recognize and better support migrant essential workers in the COVID-19 response demonstrate that change is possible. Regular updates! ODI collected already more than 80 examples worldwide and presents them with an impressive visualization.
Category: The social city
UN-Habitat COVID-19 Response Plan and Campaign
The continuing spread of the COVID-19 crisis threatens the most vulnerable in cities and communities, particularly the one billion people living in slums and informal settlements. To address the crisis, UN-Habitat is launching an urgent COVID-19 Response Plan for 64 countries focusing on immediate action in poor and densely populated areas. This is supported by the COVID-19 Campaign to mobilize support among national, city and local governments and community leaders through its network of urban professionals, grassroots organizations and businesses.
Over 95 per cent of the world’s coronavirus cases are in urban areas across over 210 countries in nearly 1,500 cities. People in informal settlements are particularly at risk as they live in overcrowded conditions, lack adequate housing and basic services such as water and sanitation and many are informal workers surviving from one day to the next. This makes it extremely hard to implement measures to slow transmission such physical distancing, self-quarantine, handwashing or community-wide lockdowns.
UN-Habitat, which has over 40 years of urban experience, much of it in humanitarian situations, is working with its partners on the ground including mayors, governors, transport and utility providers, women, youth and community organizations and NGOs to urgently deliver the USD 72 million Response Plan in Africa, the Arab States, Asia Pacific, and Latin American and the Caribbean.
This catalytic support will amplify the impact of ongoing initiatives by central and local governments, communities and other UN agencies. Funding requirements will be updated as the situation evolves and needs are further assessed.
Over 70 per cent of the support will be used to help informal settlements to improve affordable access to water and sanitation, raise awareness about COVID-19, and support initiatives to prevent people becoming homeless by providing temporary shelter or alternative income generating activities. Ensuring safe transport and repurposing buildings to isolate those infected are other priority areas.
To ensure that urban responses, such as provision of water, food, housing, health services and livelihoods, are targeted to the most vulnerable and high risk areas, UN-Habitat will assist with data collection, mapping of existing and emerging hot spots and analysis working with its network of local and global partners. This will help evidence-based decision making by local governments and key stakeholders.
As the pandemic plunges the world’s economy into a global recession, UN-Habitat is focusing on policies and measures to mitigate the local social and economic impact of COVID-19 and is working with a coalition of global thought leaders and stakeholders in public and private spheres.
UN-Habitat has already provided seed funding of over USD 1.3 million for scaling up projects in 13 countries with community preparedness, outreach and hygiene support. The agency has also jointly launched with United Cities and Local Governments and Metropolis, a #BeyondTheOutbreak virtual live learning series for mayors and local leaders to share urban solutions.
“The UN-Habitat team is working night and day to help city and community leaders on the frontline of this pandemic to reduce the risks in informal settlements and help the most vulnerable.
“With our extensive network of partners as well as our in-house experts, UN-Habitat is working closely with cities and communities to find innovative and targeted solutions to provide water and sanitation, safe transport and to mitigate the economic impact on the urban poor,” said UN-Habitat’s Executive Director, Maimunah Mohd Sharif.
“We want to help build up the resilience of our community partners to respond to specific and varied challenges over the coming months and beyond.”
At the global level, UN-Habitat shares good practice and solutions and identifies successful policy, legal measures and governance approaches to respond to current needs and long term resilience.
In Africa, UN-Habitat will support 20 countries, prioritizing the coordination of emergency preparedness and response, improving access to food and basic services including water, sanitation and hygiene, and promoting entrepreneurship. UN-Habitat’s response in 11 countries in the Arab region focuses on improving water, sanitation, and hygiene, ensuring safe transport, securing livelihoods, vulnerability assessments and risk area mapping.
In 17 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, the agency will collate, analyse and produce relevant data, improve hygiene, water, sanitation and health facilities and raise public awareness. And in 16 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, UN-Habitat will strengthen the capacity of local authorities, help mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic on the urban poor and join regional efforts to bring investment to vulnerable areas.
To amplify the impact and broaden the reach of the Response Plan, UN-Habitat is launching a COVID-19 Campaign ‘Take action with us in cities and communities’ which calls on civil society organizations, community groups, professional, academic and research institutions, businesses and local authorities to commit online to acting in solidarity to fight the pandemic in cities and helping the most vulnerable communities. The Campaign will provide a central place to network and share solutions, initiatives, good practice, lessons and stories from partners and strengthen integrated action to improve the resilience of cities and communities.
The Response Plan and the COVID-19 Campaign provide a roadmap and rallying point for the combined commitment of UN-Habitat and its network of urban actors to support cities’ proactive responses to protect their populations, halt the pandemic and work towards recovery and resilience.
For more information contact: Susannah Price, UN-Habitat Chief of Communication
Email: Susannah.price@un.org Tel: +254 722719867
UN-Habitat COVID-19 Response Plan
“The world is living through an unprecedented crisis as COVID-19 continues to spread, with tens of thousands of lives lost and over two hundred countries affected. In just a few months, the pandemic has transformed the way we live, work, travel and socialize. The world’s cities are generally reacting quickly to this urban humanitarian crisis and how they respond is critical to protect their population, halt the pandemic and set the scene for resilience and recovery.”
COVID-19 in informal urban settlements
“Most of the information about COVID-19 and who is at risk is based on data from middle and high income contexts. Many of the recommendations (to wash hands, self-isolate and physically distance) assume basic living conditions and access to essential services (e.g. water, space etc). […] Many of these strategies will not be possible to the same degree in low and middle income countries (LMICs), and especially not in urban informal settlements. With 1 billion people living in informal settlements, there is an urgent need to consider feasibility and develop locally appropriate approaches. This brief sets out key considerations for protecting informal urban settlements from the spread and impacts of COVID-19 and discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local action.”
Reclaiming Play in Cities Report
The report, launched at the 10th World Urban Forum, reviews the evidence around learning through play and the impact that city and urban environments have on children’s access to play and ultimately, their overall development.
Play is increasingly being recognised as the engine of optimal child development, future happiness and achievement. Modern play has become a multi-dimensional, multilayered experience, where narratives and characters flow easily between different play-spaces. From virtual, online and augmented life-worlds into the physical domain and back again, play has become a seamless set of interlinked experiences and opportunities for learning and pleasure.
It is therefore imperative that we design and build cities that meet the needs of children: seeking their input during the design process, providing them with access to play and education, and facilitating their social and cultural interactions.
To better understand the complexity of play in cities and support the design of play-based interventions for children optimal development the report offers a first-of-its-kind Urban Play Framework. The Urban Play Framework assesses four Dimensions
critical to ensure a play-friendly environment for optimal childhood development: they focus on children’s needs, time and opportunity to play, the support and facilitation that enable Learning through Play, and the socio-cultural and urban systems that contribute to play in cities.
More inclusive cities in East Africa: working with politics and informality
Power and informality interact in complex ways in urban shelter provision. This briefing is based on a study of three East African cities: Nairobi, Hawassa and Mogadishu. The three-year research project studied both financial constraints to accessing land or housing and non- financial constraints such as discrimination on the basis of identity. Our findings underline the importance of knowing who has power within the housing and land markets. Power does not just derive from wealth; politicians, traditional leaders, gatekeepers and others exercise influence in these markets. A person’s identity — and income — impacts the extent to which they can navigate these power structures, and the formal and informal systems that govern access to shelter. Governments and international donors need to improve the lives of the urban poor: notably with low-income, regulated rental schemes; slum-upgrading and affordable finance.
Untreated and Unsafe
Cities must ensure universal access to safe, reliable, and affordable sanitation so that all urban residents can lead productive, healthy, and thriving lives. New analysis of 15 cities in the global South shows that on average, 62 percent of sewage and fecal sludge is unsafely managed somewhere along the sanitation service chain.
Global monitoring efforts have resulted in an underestimation of the urban sanitation crisis and the risks to public health, the economy, and the environment. New data and analysis at the city and sub-city level is needed to galvanize action.
Sewers are convenient, safe, sanitary, and work well in dense urban environments and in multistory buildings. From the perspective of the household, sewer connections and services are often less expensive than on-site sanitation options.
In the absence of universal access to sewers, cities need to find an optimal combination of off-site and on-site sanitation options. On-site sanitation systems place enormous responsibility on households and private providers, and thus require strong government capacity to regulate and enforce sanitation standards to ensure public health and safety.
Citywide upgrading of informal settlements can improve low-income households’ access to urban sanitation. City governments should work with community organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and federations to improve and extend sanitation to informal settlements and address affordability.
15 Pathways to localise the Sustainable Development Goals
This publication illustrates how the 15 pathways of the Basque Declaration can be used by towns and cities to localise the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In this publication, the 15 pathways of the Basque Declaration are illustrated with stories taken from the Transformative Action database of the Sustainable Cities Platform. Each of these stories are former applications to the Transformative Action Award 2017-2019 and have been reviewed by a jury of experts, which includes representatives from the European Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank, UNESCO Etxea, the City of Aalborg (Denmark) and ICLEI Europe.
The purpose of these stories is to provide local governments and other local stakeholders with inspiration for action, rather than the formulation of yet another action plan. The examples also give insight into how to implement the goals using an integrated approach across sectors and departments. For each story, the most relevant pathway and SDGs are indicated, based on an independent assessment by ICLEI Europe. They show the diversity of approaches across topics, geographical locations and local cultures.
Resilient cities, thriving cities: The evolution of urban resilience
“This report uses the decade-long experience of the Resilient Cities Congress series as a proxy to track the evolution of the global resilience debate over the last ten years, creating a solid base to build the next decade of bold action.
It explores a variety of resilience approaches; for example, how multi-stakeholder planning has contributed to finance and boosted local resilience, or how leveraging nature-based solutions has enabled cities’ adaptation to climate change and improved people’s quality of life. The report also provides successful examples of social cohesion benefitting physical resilience, especially in informal settlements.”
Urban Girls Catalogue
The Urban Girls Catalogue is a guide in inclusive urban planning, a deep dive into the process behind#UrbanGirlsMovement and an encyclopedia of good examples that showcase how feminist and participatory urban planning can lead to improved living conditions for society at large.
These are the results from #UrbanGirlsMovement, where we have composed a catalogue featuring: Global good practices of feminist urban development (part II); the results from the pilot case #UrbanGirlsMovement Botkyrka (part III); lessons learned from the entire initiative (part IV), as well as guidelines and policy recommendations for implementing parties and local, regional, national and global policy-makers (part V). The aim of this catalogue is for you, the reader, to find the necessary arguments for challenging set norms in your specific urban development context.