Dublin hosts key forum on urban poverty

Best practices and case studies on reducing urban poverty were shared with more than 500 city leaders from across the world during the two-day World Alliance of Cities Against Poverty Forum that concluded in Dublin, Ireland, today.

The eighth edition of the Forum, organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), featured successful projects to combat poverty through both technology and a people centred-approach. This included the Safe Cities Free of Violence against Women and Girls initiative, led by UN Women, UN-Habitat and software company Microsoft.

The initiative promises to be the first global comparative effort that aims to develop and evaluate model approaches across different settings to prevent sexual harassment and violence against women and girls in public places. Beginning in 2010 with five pilot cities– Cairo, Kigali, New Delhi, Quito and Port Moresby–the initiative now works in 20 cities and aims to increase this to 35 by 2017, in which host city, Dublin, signed-up to the programme during the event.

“Progress is being made in Rio de Janeiro, where communities are using mapping technologies to identify safety risks in ten of the cities’ high-risk slums, or favelas,” said Michelle Bachelet, Executive Director, UN Women and former President of Chile. “Trained women and adolescent girls used their smartphones to map safety risks such as faulty infrastructure or services, obscured walking routes, and lack of lighting. These initial findings were presented to local authorities, and are currently being used to develop solutions.”

Edmonton, Canada, shared how it eliminated the need for a garbage dump through aggressive composting and recycling programmes to become a zero-waste city. Manila, The Philippines, is looking closely at possibly replicating the scheme.

The Forum’s organisers themselves took advantage of technology and crowdsourcing, by utilising social media which saw a further 3 million people following and participating online through Twitter and Facebook feeds.

“Technology can be a driver of change, but technology has to part of an integrated people centred-approach,” Adam Rogers, Forum Coordinator, UNDP, told Cities Today.

“The objective was to raise awareness and provide the opportunity for city leaders and others to participate and interact,” he added. “The input delivered through social media will be included in the next Forum proceedings which will be even more interactive by redirecting questions to speakers directly.”

Rogers said that the UNDP will build on this version of the Forum and the ones before to “provide city leaders with concrete tools”. An emerging country is currently being considered as next host.