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The April 2005 issue is on how to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) in urban areas – both in the informal settlements where those with unmet needs are concentrated and at a city-wide scale. It includes papers
discussing the contributions of community-driven initiatives to meeting the MDGs – for instance:
- the national programme for secure tenure in Thailand
- the framework for slum upgrading in Mumbai
- the financial institutions set up in different Central American nations to finance upgrading and affordable new-house developments for low-income groups
- the many measures taken by São Paulo city government to improve housing conditions for low-income groups between 2000 and 2004.
Two papers consider how water utilities can better reach unserved households
– one, in Argentina, focusing on reforms to a private sector utility, the other in India, discussing public sector reform in Bangalore. Papers on Havana, Hanoi and Chiang Mai discuss civil society-state relations in upgrading or environmental improvement in low-income areas. There are also papers on: an initiative by the Methodist Church in South Africa to contribute its unused land to the Homeless People’s Federation; the growing
scale of forced evictions; changes needed to land policies to reduce the growth in slums; participatory budgeting in Peru; and transferring a health programme from an international NGO to local government in Nepal.
More details, including full texts of some of the papers are available at IIED
