Credit: United Nations

By Haoliang Xu
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 2022 (IPS)

For decades, urban practitioners have failed to consider the needs of women in city decision-making and planning. Imagine being a young girl in a bustling metropolis.

Every day she hesitates to go to school, tries different routes on the public bus, walks miles in the hot sun, to avoid the sexual harassment that has become a daily occurrence in public spaces.

Or if you are a restaurant worker or coffee shop server you worry after a late-night shift about the dark alleys and the steps down to the subway station not knowing if you will face an attacker tonight.

Or delay repeatedly going to the free Covid-19 vaccine clinic because it is far away from home, because of long lines, but most importantly because there are no public toilets there. For women and girls across the world, that is often their reality.

Barriers and vulnerabilities have worsened due to the global drivers of change such as climate change, rapid urbanisation, and conflict.

Approximately 4.5 billion people, or 55% of the world population, live in urban areas, and 50% of the world’s population is made up of women and girls.

The design and layout of cities and infrastructure have a significant impact on women’s life experiences and opportunities they can access.

In a world filled with multiple challenges it is easy to push this issue aside and say this is a problem only of a handful of cities, it doesn’t impact me. But data says otherwise. For instance, in New York City, women spend an average $26 to $50 extra on transport per month for safety reasons.

A study of 28 global cities found that women were 10% more likely than men to feel unsafe in metros, and 6% more likely to feel unsafe on buses. In Ireland, 55% of women feel unsafe in public transport after dark and in the UK, 97% of young women have reported sexual harassment in public spaces.

In Jordan, 47% of women surveyed had turned down a job opportunity citing affordability and availability of public transport, and public sexual harassment as key reasons. And evidence shows that during the pandemic, urban spaces became even more hostile for women and girls.

However, this is not inevitable; cities can become a welcoming, safe and equal playing field for all. That is why the new report Cities Alive: Designing Cities that Work for Women’ released last week is such a timely intervention.

Co-authored by UNDP, along with our partners Arup and the University of Liverpool it outlines a strong blueprint on how to remove the gender bias built into cities and improve women’s safety, their health, education and employment.

Drawing on the voices and experiences of women globally, as well as prevalent data and research, the new report focuses on four critical themes:

Safety and security– Creating safer streets, providing safer mobility, and incorporating violence prevention laws and raising awareness.

Justice and equity– Ensuring gender-responsive planning in national laws, supporting the collection of gender disaggregated data, supporting women participating in urban governance at all levels.

Health and wellbeing – Creating inclusive public and green areas, enhancing access to water, hygiene and sanitation facilities, increasing access to physical and mental healthcare and nutrition facilities and providing adequate accommodation and housing models.

Enrichment and fulfilment– Providing accessible and inclusive workplaces and schools, providing safe and inclusive leisure and cultural spaces, designing for diverse and flexible use of public spaces and using the built environment to uplift women and recognize their history.

Focused on solutions, the report outlines to decision makers and urban practitioners the tools they need to move beyond dialogue to actively involving women at every stage of city design and planning – from inception to delivery.

Importantly, the report shows how increasing the participation of women in urban governance at all levels is a prerequisite for better functioning cities, with case studies of what is working from Bogota to Nairobi to San Francisco.

We know that achieving gender equity is pivotal to all the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by world leaders in 2015. With a rapidly approaching deadline of 2030 for the Global Goals, ensuring our cities work for women and girls is a giant step forward in that direction.

Haoliang Xu is UN Assistant-Secretary-General and Director of UNDP’s Bureau for Policy and Programme Support

IPS UN Bureau

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Gig economy has boosted employment of Indian women in the formal sector. Credit: UNDP India

By Haoliang Xu
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 1 2022 (IPS)

2022 is a decisive year for all of us as recovery prospects remain highly uncertain.

Global human development has witnessed a decline for the first time since the measurement began in 1990. As UNDP’s new Special Report on Human Security also reveals, 6 in 7 people worldwide are plagued by feelings of insecurity.

The pandemic has placed employer and worker organizations under increased pressure. It is posing new challenges with respect to safeguarding workplace safety and health, including in but not limited to frontline and other sectors critical to the day-to-day functioning of economies and societies, and ensuring respect for labour rights more generally, including in digitally enabled remote work arrangements which have expanded substantially during the crisis.

At the same time, sectors such as tourism and hospitality, culture, aviation, and some manufacturing and personal services continue to struggle, as do many smaller firms, resulting in many workers shifting from formal to informal and often insecure employment where labour protections, tax administration and social protection is considerably weaker.

Redoubling our efforts to effectively protect and empower vulnerable workers and enterprises, particularly those in the informal economy is clearly paramount.

Desna Dabhade has diligently facilitated online training on Warli Art for 70+ volunteers in Mumbai, India, supported by UNDP. Credit: UNDP India

Whilst this requires action on multiple fronts, there are four key levers to address the challenges:

First, data and analytics. We need more, better granular data to understand the realities and risks facing vulnerable workers and businesses, especially those in the informal economy. Efforts towards better understanding the ecosystems in which informal workers and businesses operate and building evidence, including through expanding labor market and Micro-Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) databases, should continue alongside efforts to bring the voice of workers and businesses into the mainstream.

Second, digital transformation. We need digital solutions that point to the potential of digital technologies, products and platforms. Our review of the social protection response to COVID-19 in the global South clearly indicates that greater investments in digitized registries, on-line mobile registration platforms, as well as digital delivery are instrumental to improve outreach and access for uncovered groups, including informal workers.

Likewise, digital solutions hold great promise for increasing the productivity and resilience of MSMEs, through expanding their access to financing, skills and market opportunities.

Uganda, for instance, has helped on-boarding over 3,500 informal vendors on a leading African e-commerce platform (Jumia) who are now selling over 300,000 products online and have doubled their daily turnover. The digital move gets obvious traction, and there is scope for scaling up.

Cambodia is accelerating digital transformation with over 1,500 MSMEs transitioning to e-commerce for business continuity, livelihoods, and employment. This secured jobs for 6,527 people (41% women).

Third, fostering gender equality and inclusion. We need to massively invest in digital and financial literacy while closing the gender digital divide. 2.9 billion women, mostly in developing countries, have no access to the internet. Our collective action should seek to fully protect and empower women workers and women-owned enterprises, particularly those in the informal economy. Integrating the needs of migrant workers and people with disabilities is another imperative.

Fourth, greater focus on resilience and sustainability. Sustaining enterprises and their capacity to preserve and create jobs requires improving their capacities to better prevent, anticipate and manage shocks. Equally critical is the need to encourage more environmentally and socially sustainable business practices.

For example, in India, a circular economy creates value from plastic waste. Ghana’s multi-stakeholder ‘Waste’ Recovery Platform connects all actors, formal and informal, public and private across waste management value chain and also create decent green jobs.

While considering pathways towards recovery, the informal economy cannot merely be approached from a ‘vulnerability’ or ‘deficit’ lens. The informal economy is an untapped opportunity to chart pathways for prosperity for all. It is also a world of innovation and creativity, with many invisible contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals.

One enabler to charting such pathways is to harness digital transformations, while connecting it to green transitions. Digital solutions can significantly improve informal actors’ access to social protection, skills, markets, trade, and financial opportunities.

Moreover, efficiency and productivity gains enabled by digital technologies, products and platforms and on-line one-stop shops, that bring together several registration procedures to accelerate the transition to larger, formal firms with greater scope to create jobs.

We need to move away from short-term towards long-term action that can spur transformative change in health and social protection systems, the world of work and business ecosystems.

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Unless we make bold changes in the way we produce our food and manage our land, we will not be able to cut emissions sufficiently and keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Credit: UNDP Afghanistan

By Haoliang Xu
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 3 2020 (IPS)

The theme of this year’s High-Level Political Forum, where governments reviewed progress on the Sustainable Development Goals was “Accelerated action and transformative pathways: realizing the decade of action and delivery for sustainable development.”

Throughout this forum, which took place 7-16 July, one major theme emerged: how to use Covid-19 as an opportunity to reset national and global ambition.

Perhaps no goal lends itself to accelerating global ambition more than Goals 14 and 15. These two nature-related goals, covering ‘life below water,’ and ‘life above land,’ are foundations for many other Sustainable Development Goals and their targets, especially those related to the issues of food and water security, disaster risk reduction, sustainable livelihoods and climate mitigation. In fact, implementing nature-based solutions is a fast-track path for accelerated action across more than half of the SDG targets.

We know from recent reports, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (IPBES), that biodiversity is in rapid decline; we have wiped out 83% of all wild mammals, and a million species may go extinct by mid-Century. Our window to bend the curve on nature loss is closing, and Covid-19 provides a rare window of opportunity to act now.

The cost-benefit calculus for implementing nature-based solutions is compelling. Protecting 30 percent of the planet would cost 16 percent of global GDP, and is less than three percent of the cost of fossil fuel subsidies. Yet the benefits of protecting the planet are enormous – more than 5 to 1, with benefits primarily flowing to the more than 2.5 billion people who depend directly on forestry, farming of fisheries for their survival.

The cost of inaction is equally compelling – nearly half of all Gross Domestic Product globally is at risk from nature’s loss. Furthermore, as biodiversity and ecosystems unravel, we will face new global pandemics, new water crises, famine, new ecosystem collapses and forest fires and more.

And the cost of inaction has already become untenable. Clearly the time for accelerating progress on the SDGs through nature-based solutions is now. At UNDP we see three major pathways for taking action.

Credit: UNDP Peru

Three pathways for accelerated action and transformative pathways

First, we must invest in national nature-based safety nets. Although countries have committed to protecting 17% terrestrial area and 10% marine areas through the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and have committed to restoring 100 million hectares of land by 2020 through the Bonn Challenge, these targets are likely insufficient to tackle our planetary emergency.

By setting and implementing bold measures for protecting and restoring biodiversity, countries can realize multiple benefits. One of the more important of these is climate mitigation – protecting and restoring nature can provide up to a third of our climate mitigation needs.

Second, we can use the opportunity afforded by Covid-19 to implement fiscal stimulus and financial aid packages for nature-positive and climate-aligned recovery plans that accelerate the transition to a fair and green economy.

For example, UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) provides support for developing national biodiversity finance plans. One result is that 14 countries are looking at debt-for-nature swaps to accelerate the protection of nature. Similarly, we can see how to use public works programs to create green jobs, while also achieving multiple societal benefits.

For example, Pakistan is hiring unemployed workers to plant trees and South Africa has shown that ‘Working for Water’ and other programs can achieve multiple benefits while providing jobs.

Third, we can accelerate the pioneering and innovative use of technologies that can accelerate a green recovery. For example, the GCash Forest Platform, a mobile wallet is a UNDP-supported app in the Philippines, enables people to sign up and gather points for sustainable activities such as walking, forfeiting paper bills or buying organic produce while creating a virtual tree in the app.

Once this tree has fully grown, a real tree is planted somewhere in the Philippines. More than 2 million people already signed up for the app since it was launched one year ago, and over US$ 500,000 was invested in tree planting.

The outlook from the High-Level Political Forum is sobering; we are not on track to meet the goals of the 2030 Agenda. Moreover, Covid-19 is likely to further dampen our progress across many of the SDG goals and targets.

However, we can and must take bold action now. Nature-based solutions are one of our brightest hopes to build back better, and to accelerate action through transformation.

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