Bridging the urban divide: An MDG perspective
BANGLADESH is one of the exceptional countries in terms of having already made impressive progress towards attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It has already attained the MDG on gender parity in school enrolment in both primary and secondary schooling, child mortality was halved during the 1990s, life expectancy has increased to 61 years, net primary enrolment went up significantly and women's economic participation has increased. Additionally, the country is on track with regard to several other MDGs. However, despite such advances, there has been a significant deterioration of human level outcomes and quality of life in urban areas, which jeopardizes the efforts of Bangladesh in achieving its MDG targets.
In order to assist member states realize the eight goals of the millennium declaration, the United Nations system and respective countries has set numerical targets for each goal. The United Nations system holds the responsibility to assist members states monitor and gradually attain the Target 11, one of the three targets of Goal 7 “Ensure Environmental Sustainability”. Target 11 is to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of 100 millions slum dwellers by 2020. By dealing with the people living in the most depressed physical conditions in the world's cities, Target 11 is a direct recognition that slums are a development issue which needs to be faced. Slums cannot simply be considered as an unfortunate consequence of urban poverty but need to be treated as a major issue.
At present the majority of Bangladesh's population is rural, but this situation is changing rapidly as a continuously increasing share of the population lives in urban areas. The rate of urbanization at the national level is among the fastest in the world, with the capital city Dhaka the single fastest growing metropolis- by 2025 it is expected to be the fourth largest mega cities worldwide (Source: UN Habitat 2008). Given the current trends, the national population is expected to become predominantly urban in roughly three decades. The urban share of the national population will increase from 25 to 30 percent between 2005 and 2015-the decade remaining for Bangladesh to achieve its MDGs. This trend underscores the fact that urban areas will play an increasingly important role for development outcomes at the national level, and will be increasingly important determinants over time of national welfare and performance on the MDGs.
Some recent reviews revealed that the performance of metropolitan and urban areas on a number of MDG indicators are stagnating at best, and is often worsening. As a result, urbanization in Bangladesh and the concomitant deterioration of welfare in urban areas raises serious threats about the attainability of the MDGs at the national scale. Moreover, rapid population growth in urban areas is not matched by commensurate growth in services. This has happened due to resource constraints and due to a reluctance on the part of policy makers to urban areas appear more attractive than the already are.
In Bangladesh, the significant spatial variation in outcomes for the MDGs is often driven by the poor performance of the urban areas. But even within the urban areas, substantial differences in MDG outcomes can be seen, particularly in low income areas and slums as compared to wealthier areas. The available evidence suggest that these slums, in which outcomes of many MDG-related indicators are catastrophic, have been growing at a rate of 13 percent per year, an even faster rate than the growth of metropolitan areas in Bangladesh as a whole. This rapid growth of slums not only poses immediate problems for the citizens, but also creates a set of emergent challenges to positive development outcomes that must be addressed.
The situation of service delivery in the slums and low income areas is worse than the already low metropolitan averages. For example, access to improved sanitation has increased remarkably in rural areas but has remained virtually stagnant in urban areas. Recent studies present evidence that only 35 percent of low income metropolitan inhabitants use hygiene latrines (as compared, for example, to 75 percent in non-metro urban areas).
National progress in expanding access to secondary schooling has been driven largely by improved enrolment rates in rural areas, while urban areas have been left behind. In metropolitan areas, for example, only 47 percent of primary school graduates from the poorest two quintiles are enrolled in secondary school. This outcome compares disastrously with rural areas, in which the enrolment rates among the bottom two quintiles are nearly 70 percent. Nearly half of all households (46 percent) in urban areas report a lack of access to health care, and poor households have even lower rates of access. Only 12 percent of the poor report receiving care from free government health centers (World Bank 2005), and many cannot afford the additional bribes and payments necessary to secure care.
Urban areas experience widespread problems with both access to and quality of services. For many sectors that are directly and indirectly associated with the MDGs, rapid urbanization has made ensuring access to services difficult, and has diminished the quality of existing services. It is therefore necessary to address immediately the first generation of service delivery problems such as access.
In order to do that, a major policy shift towards urban poverty reduction is necessary on many fronts, particularly with regard to provision of services to slum dwellers and settlements without tenure. Successful models of service delivery in slums and low income communities of urban areas demonstrate that it is indeed possible to provide services in slums. Most importantly, slum dwellers are willing to pay for decent services and assist in the management of common resources. Sometimes these successes have occurred because NGOs or communities have themselves assumed the associated risks. But unfortunately most of the agencies including donors, NGOs, and the private entrepreneurs are often reluctant to provide formal services to slums for fear of losing their investments should evictions occur. This situation presents one of the most significant constraints to service delivery in metropolitan areas.
Urban experts state that the special challenges posed by urban areas must be addressed by starting with problems of institutional inadequacy. Urban institutions are not structured to adopt the lessons of accountability from the successful rural experiences. Urban local government institutions, especially the major municipalities and city corporations, are not adapted to the needs of urban poor. For example, a ward member in Dhaka represents approximately 100,000 people and cannot provide adequate representation to the needs of the urban population, especially the poor. Also, there is a large number of floating population, who belong to the poorest strata of the society, and remain out of reach of any institutional services in the absence of any explicit urban policy framework by the government. Moreover, most NGOs and donors in Bangladesh tend to focus their attention on rural areas but they must begin to address the emerging urban challenge in systematic manner.
Different social support schemes and successful rural development programs such as female scholarship program and rural maintenance program could be modified to fit the urban context. There is a pressing need to expand incentives to attend school for the poor in urban areas as their enrollment rate is now lower than the poor in rural areas.
Another critical acknowledgement that must be made is for policymakers to recognize that those moving to urban areas are not transients and their problems need to be addressed on a permanent basis. Foremost among these is the critical problem of some form of recognition of the tenure-related rights of the slum dweller, this is critical as the basis for service delivery. The government ought to recognize that special attention must be given to the problems of urban areas, particularly slums and low income groups' areas, or the gains made so far could be overturned by the sheer scope and scale of the emergent urban issues.