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	The global housing crisis is a human rights crisis by OHCHR, IIED, SDI, Habitat for Humanity, agencies   Oct. 2023   UN expert urges action to end global affordable housing crisis. (OHCHR)   A UN expert today warned of a severe affordable housing crisis, despite housing being a fundamental human right long recognised under international law.   “The world is grappling with a situation where more and more people are unable to afford their housing costs. Millions lack the financial means to access safe, secure and habitable housing,” said Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.   In his report to the UN General Assembly, the expert stressed that thousands of people are evicted every day simply because they cannot pay their housing costs, contributing to rising homelessness.   He noted that a staggering 1.6 billion people around the world lack adequate housing and basic services, with projections that this could rise to 3 billion by 2030. It is estimated that 100 million people worldwide are homeless.   “States, intergovernmental organisations and institutions should make more concerted efforts to address the underlying causes of housing unaffordability,” Rajagopal said. He pointed to several causes, including housing financialisaton, lack of local government authority, and weak tax policies.   In his report, the Special Rapporteur highlighted the ripple effects that occur when people are unable to afford housing, putting their well-being and physical and mental health at risk. “When their rights to security of tenure, livelihoods and access to energy, safe water and sanitation are weakened, it ultimately violates the right to a life in dignity,” Rajagopal said.   The expert outlined concrete steps that States can take to achieve the goal of affordable housing for all. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to ensuring affordable housing for all, and States should choose options that best suit their specific needs and circumstances,” he said.   “Inclusive participation can tailor responses to different needs,” Rajagopal said. He stressed the importance of pursuing policy and institutional options that hold the promise of better outcomes, including co-housing, land banks, and rent regulation.   The Special Rapporteur warned that the affordable housing crisis does not affect everyone equally, but falls disproportionately on vulnerable groups who already face discrimination.   He urged States to recognise affordability as an integral part of the right to adequate housing in their national or constitutional law, which is lacking in most cases.   “As a global call to action to counteract and prevent the negative effects of the escalating trend towards unaffordable housing, this report should serve as a major catalyst for achieving affordable housing for all,” the expert said.   http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-urges-action-end-global-affordable-housing-crisis   July 2023   World Leaders need to prioritize the more than 1 Billion People living in Informal Settlements, by Jonathan Reckford - CEO of Habitat for Humanity International and Joseph Muturi - Chair of Slum Dwellers International.   When representatives from dozens of countries gathered recently at the UN High Level Political Forum in New York to share progress on their efforts to achieve the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this disturbing reality was clear: the world is not even close to meeting the goals by 2030 as intended.   According to the report released at the meeting, progress on more than half of the SDG targets is weak and insufficient, with 30% of targets stalled or in reverse. In particular, progress towards SDG 11, which centers on making “cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” is stagnating, signaling regression for the third year in a row.   Unless governments take urgent action to address the plight of more than 1 billion people struggling daily to survive in slums and other poorly constructed informal settlements, we will not achieve the SDGs.   Access to affordable, safe housing is a fundamental human right, and intrinsically linked to building sustainable and resilient communities. It’s time world leaders turned their attention to improving housing conditions in informal settlements as a critical first step in helping to solve the most pressing development challenges of our time, from health and education to jobs and climate resilience.   Consider Milka Achieng, 31, who lives among the more than 250,000 residents of Kibera, a bustling hub of mud-walled homes and small businesses that make up one of the world’s largest informal settlements on the south side of Nairobi, Kenya.   Every day, Milka heads out for work and walks past the kiosk where she pumps water that isn’t clean enough to drink without boiling. She passes neighbors who live with the constant fear of eviction and the threat of deadly fires sparked by jerry-rigged electrical lines.   Yet despite these conditions, Milka remains upbeat. She works for a Kenya-based startup that, from its production facility in the heart of Kibera, cranks out firesafe housing blocks designed to make homes in informal settlements safer and more resilient. These are the kinds of innovative, scalable solutions that not only hold promise for the future of Kibera, but also for the millions of families struggling to keep their loved ones healthy and safe in informal communities around the globe.   By 2050, nearly 70% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban areas, making the proliferation of informal settlements inevitable – unless world governments take bold, collective action.   A new report reveals the incredible, transformational benefits – in terms of health, education, and income – if world leaders invest in upgrading housing in informal settlements.   The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) modeling from 102 low- and middle-income countries shows that if people living in informal settlements gained access to adequate housing, the average life span would jump 2.4 years on average globally, saving 730,000 lives each year.   This translates to more deaths prevented than if malaria were to be eliminated. The report also found that as many as 41.6 million additional children would be enrolled in school worldwide.   Economic growth, meanwhile, would jump by as much as 10.5% in some countries, whether measured as GDP or gross national income per capita. The resulting increase in living standards would exceed the projected cost of improving informal settlements in many countries.   These findings provide a long-overdue wake-up call to governments and municipal authorities that prioritizing safe and secure housing would have far-reaching implications for advancing not just community wellbeing, but national and global economic prosperity.   World leaders who don’t prioritize improving informal settlements are making a grave mistake. Their goals related to education, health, and other areas of human wellbeing hinge on how well the world responds to trends such as growing inequities, rapid urbanization, and a worsening global housing crisis.   As the heads of an international housing organization and a global network of slum dwellers, respectively, we believe governments have an urgent responsibility to invest in comprehensive solutions to our global housing crisis.   This includes supporting start-ups, such as Milka’s factory, which are pioneering innovative, low-cost, and community-driven solutions to strengthen the foundation of unsafe housing settlements worldwide.   Simultaneously, officials at the global, national and municipals levels must ensure that residents have land tenure security, climate-resilient homes, and basic services such as clean water and sanitation.   Importantly, IIED researchers also concluded that, while they couldn’t put a precise number on it, the rehabilitation of informal settlements would have a clear and positive “spillover effect” by strengthening environmental, political and health care systems for all. This, in turn, would improve overall societal wellbeing for generations to come.   Upgrading the world’s supply of adequate housing is a lever for equitable human development and a cornerstone for sustainable urban development. Global, national and community stakeholders must join forces with the more than 1 billion voices clamoring for greater access to safe and secure homes.   When residents of informal settlements do better, everyone does better. Strikingly, it’s that simple.   * IIED Home Equal report: http://tinyurl.com/2fvn7hp2   http://www.habitat.org/ap/home-equals-ap http://www.iied.org/better-for-everyone-exposing-hidden-value-equitable-housing-informal-settlements http://www.iied.org/tag/informal-settlements-slums http://sdinet.org/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/01/states-obligated-safeguard-equitable-access-and-use-land-un-committee http://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/annual-thematic-reports   Oct. 2023   Ending child poverty is vital for a sustainable future, write Olivier De Schutter, Hugh Frazer, Anne-Catherine Guio and Eric Marlier.   The vicious cycles perpetuating poverty and disadvantage across generations have enormous economic, social and environmental costs. Ending them is essential for a sustainable future. Above all this requires urgent and radical action to tackle the deep-seated inequalities causing child poverty.   The future wellbeing and indeed survival of increasing numbers of children across the world is more and more at risk. Already too many children are growing up in poverty and the perpetuation of poverty from one generation to the next is deeply entrenched.   Poverty disproportionately affects households with children: children are twice as likely to live in extreme poverty as adults. Globally, approximately 800 million children aged 0–18 years are subsisting below a poverty line of US $3.20 a day, and one billion children are experiencing multidimensional poverty, with multiple deprivations in the areas of health, nutrition, education or standards of living, including housing.   Child poverty and the Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty (IGPP) are now being compounded by the impact of climate change.   Around one third of the world’s child population is living with the dual impacts of poverty and high climate risk. With the devastating effects of extreme weather destroying livelihoods and communities and leading to mass migration, more and more children are at risk.   The current spate of heatwaves, megafires, deadly floods and landslides in many countries across the world is bringing the reality of the climate crisis to the doors of more and more children.   It is no longer just a remote disaster that has been destroying lives and communities in many parts of the developing world and trapped them in poverty and a struggle for survival. It is now an existential threat to the future wellbeing of children in all countries, developed and developing.   The challenges posed by the climate crisis, the persistence of child poverty and the Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty, are inextricably bound together and to tackle one we must tackle the others.   They share a common origin: an economic system based on excessive consumption by some when others lack access to essential goods and services and cannot meet their basic needs, and the deeply unsustainable use of natural resources. Positive social change that will transform our societies and build an inclusive economy is vital to addressing these three challenges.   One of the keys to such a transformation and to building a sustainable future will be to tackle inequality and ensure real equality of opportunity for all. Above all, this will require intensifying action to end child poverty as this is essential to creating equality of opportunity for all and ending the Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty.   If we are to end child poverty and the Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty we must start by asking ourselves why in a world of plenty there is a collective failure to eradicate poverty. We believe this is because we only rarely move beyond the symptoms to address the root causes, particularly in early childhood, of the Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty; because of the efforts of governments being obstructed, in particular as a result of mistaken beliefs concerning ‘merit’ and ‘incentives’; because of the self-interest of and exploitation by some who control excessive wealth and resources; and because of a failure to properly assess the costs to society of poverty and inequalities.   For instance, the current failure to eradicate poverty imposes a huge cost on society. In a country such as the United States, child poverty costs over US$1 trillion annually, representing 5.4 per cent of its gross domestic product, taking into account the loss of economic productivity, greater health and crime expenses, and increased costs as a result of child homelessness and maltreatment.   Investing in children, conversely, has considerable returns: for every dollar spent on reducing childhood poverty, seven dollars would be spared.   To break the vicious cycles that lead to IGPP and persistent child poverty, we should move beyond a reliance on the classic approach to poverty reduction based on economic growth combined with progressive taxation and social protection.   We need to both strengthen our post-market redistribution mechanisms and put more emphasis on the pre-market mechanisms that cause social exclusion. This means building an inclusive economy: one that prevents exclusion rather than causing exclusion and compensating it post hoc.   In strengthening our post-market redistribution mechanisms, three priorities will be vital.   First, mobilising increased resources to combat poverty by widening the tax base and implementing progressive tax policies. Second, strengthening social protection and protecting basic income security. Third, ensuring effective access for children to food, housing, sport, culture and leisure activities, childcare, education, healthcare and other key services.   What we need is a move from an extractive and exclusive economy to a regenerative and inclusive one. In particular, we believe that this will involve three things: i) advancing a jobs-rich model of development which makes the right to work a reality; ii) introducing a basic income for young adults; and iii) prohibiting discrimination on grounds of socioeconomic disadvantage.   Of course, the scale of economic, social and environmental changes required, essential though they are for all our futures, will not be easily achieved.   We must place the goal of ending child poverty and Intergenerational Perpetuation of Poverty at the heart of our economic and political systems and thus embed it in all our economic, social and environmental policies as well as in the systems for delivering them.   There is no excuse for the perpetuation of the vicious cycles that diminish life chances of children in poverty: we know the range of policies and actions that are needed to break them. Thus, given the damage that poverty does to people’s lives, to social cohesion, to the economy and to environmental sustainability, we can imagine no objective more urgent or worthwhile pursuing.   * Olivier De Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Professor at UCLouvain, Belgium and SciencesPo, France. Hugh Frazer is Adjunct Professor at Maynooth University, Ireland, a former Director of the Irish Government’s Combat Poverty Agency and an expert on European Union (EU) social policy and child poverty.   Anne-Catherine Guio is Senior Researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and ensured the scientific coordination of the first two EU’s Feasibility Studies for a ‘European Child Guarantee’. Eric Marlier is International Scientific Coordinator at LISER and manages the 38-country ‘European Social Policy Analysis Network’ funded by the EU.   http://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2023/10/16/ending-child-poverty-is-vital-for-a-sustainable-future/
	The Case for Universal Social Protection by Amnesty International   Amnesty International is calling for social security to be made available to everyone worldwide after a series of crises exposed huge gaps in state support and protection systems, leaving hundreds of millions facing hunger or trapped in a cycle of poverty and deprivation.   In a briefing issued, Rising Prices, Growing Protests: The Case for Universal Social Protection, the human rights organization also calls for international debt relief, and urges states to enact tax reforms and clampdown on tax abuse, to free up substantial funding to pay for social protection.   “A combination of crises has revealed how ill-prepared many states are to provide essential help to people. It is shocking that over 4 billion people, or about 55% of the world’s population, have no recourse to even the most basic social protection, despite the right to social security being enshrined since 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.   The briefing shows how rising food prices, climate change, and the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are driving a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and leading to increased social unrest and protests.   It urges states to ensure that social security coverage — such as sickness and disability payments, healthcare provision, pensions for older people, child support, family benefits and income support — is available to every person who may need it.   The briefing shows how the lack of social security in many states has left communities more exposed to sudden economic shocks, the consequences of conflict, climate change, or other upheaval. The fallout from these crises, including widespread hunger, higher unemployment and anger at falling living standards, has motivated protests around the world, which have often been brutally suppressed.   “Universal social protection can address the violations of economic and social rights that are often at the heart of grievances and protest. Instead of viewing peaceful protest as an expression of people’s attempts to claim their rights, authorities have frequently responded to demonstrations with unnecessary or excessive use of force. Peaceful protest is a human right and Amnesty International campaigns to Protect the Protest,” said Agnes Callamard.   The briefing calls for international creditors to reschedule or cancel debts to enable them to better fund social protection. It also highlights that the cost of offering basic social security protection in all low income and low-to-middle income states is estimated at US$440.8 billion a year, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), an amount that is less than the US$500 billion the Tax Justice Network estimated is lost annually by states to tax havens around the world.   Amnesty International urges states to work together and to use all their resources, as well as reform of their taxation systems to stop evasion and loss of critical revenues, to help ensure funds are available to improve social protection.   “People have been brought to their knees by these crises, and when it comes to fixing the problems in the world, the solutions are rarely simple, but we do know that states should get serious about clamping down on tax abuse,” said Agnes Callamard.   To guarantee the right to social security, Amnesty International supports the establishment of an internationally administered Global Fund for Social Protection, a concept supported by UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, the UN Secretary-General and the ILO.   The creation of a fund would offer states technical and financial support to provide social security and would aim to build the capacity of national social protection systems to scale up their responses in times of crisis.   Hunger, poverty and protests   The lack of adequate social security can be catastrophic for the growing numbers of people struggling to afford food.   The World Food Programme (WFP) says 349 million people around the world are in immediate danger from a shortage of food, and 828 million go to bed hungry every night.   Furthermore, according to the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022, the Covid-19 pandemic has wiped out almost four years of progress in poverty reduction and pushed an additional 93 million people into extreme poverty, living on less than US$ 2.15 a day.   The lack of effective measures to mitigate inflation and shortages has led to a downward spiral in people’s living standards. This has contributed to protests around the world recently, including in Iran, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka.   The rising price of food and other essential items has hit people living in low-income countries the hardest, but the increased use of food banks in wealthier countries shows that the cost-of-living and food affordability crisis is widespread.   Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major grain producer, has dealt a devastating blow to global food supplies, and pushed the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) food price index to its highest point since records began in 1990.   Climate change, and spiralling fertilizer prices, have hit agricultural production too. Drought is the greatest single contributor to reduced harvests, according to the FAO.   Social security, tax and debt   Amnesty International is part of a growing coalition of experts and civil society organizations calling on states to progressively deliver universal social protection, and to realize the benefits it will bring.   Agnes Callamard said: “Protecting people against losses due to shocks, from disasters or economic reversals, can be transformational, both for society and the state that provides the support, by reducing social tension and conflict, and promoting recovery. It enables children to stay in education, improves healthcare, reduces poverty and income inequality, and ultimately benefits societies economically.   “We cannot continue to look away as inequality soars, and those struggling are left to suffer. Tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance by individuals and corporations are depriving states and particularly lower income countries of the resources they need.”   High levels of debt, and the cost of servicing it, mean that heavily indebted states often lack the financial capacity to realize social security aspirations. Low-income countries spend four times more on debt repayments than they do on health service provision, and 12 times more on debt payments than on social protection, according to Oxfam.   According to the IMF’s annual report around 60% of low-income countries are in debt distress or at a high risk of debt distress, and risk defaulting on repayments. Debt cancellation or rescheduling would free up substantial funding in many countries to pay for social protection.   http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/05/global-amnesty-international-calls-for-universal-social-protection-as-overlapping-crises-leave-hundreds-of-millions-facing-disaster/ http://www.socialprotectionfloorscoalition.org/civil-society-call/ http://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/25/questions-and-answers-right-social-security Visit the related web page
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