UNICEF - UN Children's Fund
UNICEF drives change for children and young people every day, across the globe.
About
UNICEF recognizes the importance of sustainable urban development for the overall achievement of child rights. It is becoming increasingly evident that the SDGs for children will not be achieved unless there is a particular focus on the children living in precarious urban areas, especially in slums and informal settlements. Of the more than 1 billion people living in these settlements, around 350 million of them are children without adequate access to services and protection.
Children living in urban settings, particularly the most impoverished and marginalized, represent a new frontier for UNICEF’s work and equity focus. The available data clearly shows that children from the poorest urban households are not getting fair access to vital services, such as health care, education, water, sanitation, housing, transportation and basic infrastructure, a recipe for intergenerational cycles of inequity and poverty. Without enhanced planning and sound investments, urban poverty is likely to deepen in the next decades. And with almost 70 per cent of the world’s children projected to live in urban areas by mid-century, it is imperative that UNICEF broadens its equity agenda to explicitly include the marginalized children living in the world’s slums, informal settlements and impoverished neighbourhoods.
Urban settings also present risks to, and opportunities for protecting children’s rights in humanitarian crises. Armed conflict and the use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas cause death and injury amongst civilians. Earthquakes, severe storms and floods cause unique levels of devastation in urban areas. Epidemics spread rapidly in densely populated areas, as in the case of COVID. With forced displacement becoming increasingly protracted in many parts of the world, urban areas that are experiencing sharp influxes of refugees, migrants and displaced persons are often experiencing pressure on local services, which can spill over into social tensions. At the same time, urban areas can also offer safe haven for those fleeing from violence, discrimination and conflict.
The opportunity has never been greater to resolve urban inequities for the world’s most disadvantaged children living in urban settings. Urban areas are the world’s strongest source of diversity, growth and innovation, and provide potentially unlimited opportunities for children to survive, thrive, learn, participate, integrate and reach their full potential.
In this regard, UNICEF is implementing intervention in urban areas in more than 80 countries. In 71 countries, UNICEF has supported national and local data systems to generate disaggregated for children in urban settings and in some 46 countries UNICEF supported making national urban development plans child responsive. Further, in 40 countries, UNICEF supported 395 towns and cities in child responsive planning and budgeting.
In 2023, SDG11 on sustainable cities and communities will be under in-depth review at the High-level political forum in July in New York. In view of this meeting and the preparation of Voluntary National Reviews by Member States, UNICEF formulated key asks to all governments to develop requires systematic policy and programmatic responses for building child-responsive sustainable cities and communities at local and national levels.
To address issues of rapid urbanization, complex urban governance, and the associated equity and inclusion challenges, UNICEF is strengthening, revamping, and scaling up its programming in urban areas. The following priority areas reflect the outcomes of UNICEF’s work for children in urban settings, including in humanitarian and fragile contexts:
Priority 1: Data and evidence
Disaggregated data about children inform decisions at the local level.
Priority 2: Local/city governance for planning, budgeting, and financing
Local development policies, strategies, plans, and budgets are child responsive.
Priority 3: Community engagement/empowerment
Communities, children, and adolescents have a say in decisions at the local level affecting their lives.
Priority 4: Access to services
Delivery of social services at the local level is effectively coordinated.
Priority 5: Urban planning
Urban spatial plans are child responsive.
Priority 6: Humanitarian crisis in urban areas
Urban governance structures are strengthened to respond to crises effectively.
They are elaborated in a Strategic note on UNICEF's work for children in urban settings.
The Global Framework for Urban Water, Sanitation and Hygiene defines UNICEF contribution to urban Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). The Framework is a strategic vision for urban WASH programming by UNICEF across global, regional and country levels with focus on promoting equitable access to WASH for the poorest and most marginalized urban populations.
The need for an increased focus on urban WASH is driven by this increasing number of vulnerable children and their families living in poor urban environments across the world: deep and profound inequalities within urban areas mean that many children living in slums and other impoverished urban settlements are being deprived of their right to water and sanitation, with serious implications on their survival, growth and development.
The Framework is based on UNICEF’s experiences in urban WASH programming in over 50 countries. It is structured around three areas of support: sector-level, service-level and user-level support, with suggested entry points and activities for engagement in urban WASH. The Framework also considers three different urban contexts: urban slums, small towns and urban areas in humanitarian and protracted crisis settings, focusing on areas where UNICEF can add value, in line with the organisation’s equity agenda.
The Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) is a UNICEF-led initiative that supports municipal governments in realizing the rights of children at the local level using the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as its foundation.
It is also a network that brings together government and other stakeholders such as civil society organizations, the private sector, academia, media and, importantly, children themselves who wish to make their cities and communities more child-friendly.
The Initiative was launched by UNICEF and UN-Habitat in 1996 to act on the resolutions passed during the second UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II), which declared that the well-being of children is the ultimate indicator of a healthy habitat, a democratic society and good governance.
CFCI provides a governance framework for building child-friendly cities and communities. The framework consists of two pillars: goals and results to be achieved; and strategies to achieve these goals and results. The strategies streamline the original nine building blocks, set out in 2004.
UNICEF brought out a handbook that calls all urban stakeholders to invest in child-responsive urban planning, recognizing that cities are not only drivers of prosperity, but also of inequity. Through 10 Children’s Rights and Urban Planning principles, the handbook presents concepts, evidence, tools and promising practices to create thriving and equitable cities where children live in healthy, safe, inclusive, green and prosperous communities. By focusing on children, it provides guidance on the central role that urban planning should play in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, from a global perspective to a local context.
