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The World Bank has initiated an Action Plan for an ambitious goal of addressing the slum problem in cities. The Plan focuses on upgrading the most squalid, unhealthy and often vulnerable urban environments: the urban slums and squatter settlements of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It aims to improve basic municipal services for 100 million people over the next twenty years. This would commit the Bank to an ambitious, yet highly targeted effort to change the lives of slum dwellers worldwide. It calls for a ratcheting up of resources and a coherence of priorities, programs and organizational arrangements within the Bank, as well as engaging committed partners (development agencies, cities and countries) willing to make a concerted, results-driven attack on the slum problem.

The Action Plan aims to do this by:

• challenging donors, governments and the slum communities to immediately improve the lives of 5 million slum dwellers by 2005 and 100 million by 2020;

• increasing Bank slum upgrading investments as a central thrust of the new Urban Strategy;

• leading a worldwide enterprise to move from pilot projects to upgrading to scale with the required resources; and,

• investing in global knowledge, learning and capacity in slum upgrading.

Achieving this goal will require powerful leadership, resolute political commitments, and ownership at the local level, coupled with broad-based partnerships at the global level. The Bank and UNCHS (Habitat) have taken a first step to create a framework for these global partnerships by initiating the Cities Alliance - a major global alliance of cities and their development partners "to make unprecedented improvements in the living conditions of the urban poor." Our partners in this Alliance will also need to include regional development banks and other UN agencies such as UNDP, UNICEF, and ILO. However, the credibility and resources required for success will depend on the Bank's leadership in incorporating citywide and nationwide slum upgrading within the Bank's poverty-based strategy for the next millennium.

UN Millenium Summit
The Cities Without Slums Action Plan was endorsed at the Millenium Summit of the United Nations, the largest gathering ever of world leaders. Its goal of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers was included in the Millenium Declaration and a follow-up Roundtable was held specifically on the topic in October at UN Headquarters in New York.

To read more about the UN Millenium declaration: http://www.un.org/millennium/