Urban work

Unsanitary conditions and pollution are acute in some unplanned urban settlements like many slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Credit: Brent Stirton

Nearly 50% of the world's population now live in urban areas and every day a further 180,000 people move to cities from the country. As more poor people migrate to towns and cities to escape rural poverty and seek better opportunities, the populations living in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions in urban slums continue to rise.

There are now at least 750 million people living in urban squatter settlements without adequate shelter or basic services and without legal title to their land. The numbers of people living in these settlements is expanding so rapidly that governments are unable to keep up with the necessary infrastructure development and services like water and sanitation are woefully inadequate.

Because of the increasing need we have pledged to increase our urban work to help ensure that these, some of the world's poorest people, gain access to water and sanitation.

Urban water and sanitation problems

WaterAid's urban work in practice

Our projects were initially all in rural areas until 1990 when we began working in urban areas on a small scale. Now we have, or are developing, urban projects of differing scales in all of the 15 countries in Africa and Asia where we work. We are aiming to allocate around 30% of our funds to urban work in the future to help address this huge, growing problem.

The scale of the problem varies greatly from city to city and town to town. In large urban centres like Dhaka, Bangladesh, the problem is vast; here the population has risen from 250,000 in the early 1970s to more than 12 million today. Millions of people live in the city's slums in such crowded conditions that many are even forced to live on the wrong side of flood barriers, in homes that flood annually.

Across the developing world in towns and cities of all sizes there are thousands of similar unplanned squatter settlements without facilities. Millions live "off the map" in communities that are unrecognised by the authorities and ignored in city development plans. Different solutions and approaches are needed for each problem but we are developing models of working in urban contexts that can be adapted to each situation.

Much of our experience of working in urban areas is from Asia and we are now taking lessons from there to expand our work further into the towns and cities of Africa.

Download the Urban Work issue sheet ( PDF 409Kb)