The programme's purpose is to strengthen the capacity of local, central, and regional institutions and key stakeholders in settlement and slum improvement through the use of good governance and management approaches, pilot projects, and contributing, where needed, to policy development and the implementation of institutional, legislative, financial, and normative and implementation frameworks. To meet these challenges, the PSUP programme seeks to harmonize with local and national stakeholders on key slum upgrading projects through creating a network for regional slum upgrading challenges. For this purpose, regional training and policy seminars on the programme's concept, themes, and methods will be organized with all stakeholders involved. The programme also aims to support local and national authorities in identifying adequate funding to carry out specific activities.
Objective 1: To enable national, city and community representatives and planning authorities to assess urban development needs and urban poverty in ACP countries through applying cross-sector approaches and building ownership for the urban sector challenges – this includes the acknowledgement of informal settlements as an integral part of cities, and with the population therein addressed through a rights-based approach.
Particularly, municipalities and line ministries responsible for urban development lack human and financial resources for urban governance and management. Actions in urban areas lack coordination and often there is duplication of efforts addressing the same context with very limited resources. Further, apart from strengthening institutions to address urban poverty in an appropriate way, a link between financing and technical government bodies is essential to finance urban poverty in a sustainable way, also beyond this action.
Objective 2: To empower ACP countries national, city and community representatives as well as planning authorities to address slum dwellers' needs for better living conditions in their cities with adequate planning tools and realistic resource mobilization strategies – addressing and including the slum population directly in designing slum upgrading programmes.
Often the identification of slum upgrading needs lack continuation, implementation and the participation of the target group. The formulation of slum upgrading projects is often isolated and sector specific. This often leads to single projects improving living conditions in the short-term or even leading to conflicts and negative impacts on the ground.
The capacity to develop slum upgrading programmes in an integrated and participatory manner under the leadership of the government and in the context of the whole city or town, with its overall development opportunities, is not taken care off.
In addition, policy and regulatory frameworks often hinder sustainable and affordable urban infrastructure, land and housing (from plot sizes, land regulations or secure tenure and housing building codes to provision of basic services). This programme aims at overcoming divides of the informal and formal city and improvement at national and city or town level.
Objective 3: Empower national, city and community representatives and planning authorities to implement innovative slum upgrading programmes that demonstrate successful slum upgrading interventions which are to be up-scaled and replicated in other towns, cities and neighbourhoods and increase visibility.
Besides during the implementation of slum upgrading programmes, not all key stakeholders are aware or involved in the process. This can lead to institutional and community blockages in cross-sector activities or to the initial target group not fully benefiting from the action, and if implemented with external experts, the lack of replication and institutional memory.
The design and implementation of slum upgrading activities shall be carried by all stakeholders with their different roles. It shall create job opportunities for the target group and be enriched through their local knowledge. By having the cross-sector approach, actions and improvements shall multiply their impact through feeding into each other. The high visibility and improved capacity shall lead to an up-scaling and replication of activities finding its reflection in national priorities, budgets and policies beyond this action.
In order to achieve the three major operational objectives in an efficient way, UN-Habitat emphasises the importance of a coherent advocacy strategy. This can be strengthened by an enforced tripartite partnership between the European Commission and the European Union Delegations, the ACP Secretariat and UN-Habitat, as well as government (line ministries and finance and planning ministries) to prioritise and budget for urban development needs and slum upgrading.
The PSUP is carried out at local, national and regional levels. Local, national and regional programme focal points are trained on effective and inclusive stakeholder mapping and mobilisation in different programme processes. The programme is fully implemented by national implementation partners and overseen by national stakeholders.
The stakeholders consist of the following:
Local level: local authorities at all levels (both managerial and political), NGOs, CBOs, planning and training institutions, research institutions, academia, the private and informal sector, as well as local slum upgrading initiatives and slum dwellers of identified neighbourhoods;
National level: relevant ministries, technical departments, offices providing statistics, local government associations, national and international NGOs, CBO representatives, private and informal sector representatives, academia, and national planning, development and training institutions.
The PSUP approach aims to build country teams reflecting both local and national interests. Particular attention will be given to the selection of implementing agencies in order to provide a higher degree of capacity-building in relevant institutions and to embed the activities of the programme in the institutional set-up of respective countries.
UN-HABITAT will develop a communication strategy and also provide the framework of collaboration for an efficient overall programme execution and collaboration for undertaking and financing slum upgrading programmes in ACP countries.
