UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday recommended public-private partnerships, the empowerment of women and extended property rights as ways of tackling the poverty in the world's growing cities.
"Today, urban areas are the major driving forces of development and globalisation," he told a special three-day session of the UN General Assembly.
"But with the shift to cities, many of society's inequities and ills and becoming more and more urban."
The special session is a follow-up to the second global conference on human settlements, held in 1996 in Istanbul.
Annan noted that two-thirds of the cities in developing countries do not have waste-water treatment, and that in countries with economies in transition, 75 percent of solid waste is disposed of in open dumps.
"Progress will not happen without leadership," he told delegates.
"All of you, in your own way, are leaders who must answer to the inhabitants of the world's slums, favelas, barrios, ghettoes, shanty towns and squatter settlements."
Annan stressed three ways in which the problems of cities could be addressed.
"Two thirds of the world's cities have established new public-private partnerships in the last five years," he said.
"Local authorities, NGOs, women's organisations and other civil society groups made enormous contributions."
Second, Annan said, good governance was a precondition for effective and efficient administration.
"In particular we must strengthen the role of women and ensure that all decision-makers, male and female, address the issues that affect women, who are the unsung heroes of poor urban areas," he said.
"A third very important issue facing tens of millions of urban families is the lack of secure tenure," he said.
"Action in this area has the potential to create considerable wealth and provide a major route out of poverty."
The president of the UN General Assembly, Harri Holkeri, recalled that last year's UN Millennium summit set itself the goals of halving the number of people living in poverty by 2015 and to make a significant improvement to the lives of 100 million urban slum dwellers by 2020. |
