Key Issues

Much of the work on urban poverty in the last five years has involved drawing on the knowledge and practical experience of Asian, Latin American and African NGO staff. This includes critical thinking about the nature of urban poverty, its underlying causes and the most effective ways of addressing it, based on practical experiences.

Principal topics we are currently working on are:

• Pro-poor shelter development
• Micro-finance for housing and neighbourhood development
• Addressing the needs of urban children and adolescents

IIED’s Human Settlements Programme has been working on urban environmental issues since the mid-1970s. Both our topics and our ways of working are informed by our poverty focus. People on very low incomes, living in slums or squatter settlements, tend to be the most vulnerable to all three types of environmental burdens, but are particularly susceptible to the local environmental hazards in and around their home.

The principal topics that we are currently working on are:

• Improving water and sanitation provision in deprived urban settlements
• Adapting Cities to Climate Change
• Local Agenda 21 and similar urban environmental initiatives
• Reconciling the Brown and Green Agendas

Rural-urban interactions can be defined as linkages across space (such as flows of people, goods, money, information and wastes) and linkages between sectors (for example, between agriculture and services and manufacturing). In broad terms, they also include 'rural' activities taking place in urban centres (such as urban agriculture) and activities often classified as 'urban' (such as manufacturing and services) taking place in rural settlements.

The principal topics that we are currently working on are:

• Governance in decentralised structures, especially in small urban centres and peri-urban areas
• The role of urban centres in the development of their surrounding rural region
• Income diversification and rural non-farm employment
• Migration and mobility
• Transformations in peri-urban areas