UN official warns against towns growing out of control

The executive director of the UN Centre for Human Settlements (HABITAT), Anna Tibaijuka, warned on Friday of the dangers of Tanzanian cities growing too fast and becoming unmanageable. Signing a memorandum of understanding on HABITAT's "Cities without Slums" initiative, Tibaijuka named Tanzanian cities that she said were growing at unprecedented rates and cautioned that adequate living conditions had to be guaranteed for residents. "If cities don’t get assistance, they could degenerate into untenable situations," she said. According to UN figures, she said, Tabora - a town near mining areas in the northwest of the country - was growing at a rate of 11 percent, making it the fasting growing city in Africa. She also said that Mwanza, another mining town in the northwest, was as a fast growing urban centre. Although officials who attended the signing of the memorandum declined to give details, they said that the government and HABITAT launched the Cities Without Slums initiative for Tanzania on Friday. "We have just agreed to work together. The details of what we will do will be worked out later," Joram Mgweno, the director of human settlements in the Ministry of Land and Human Settlements Development, told IRIN. He added that there had been a lot of planning for Tanzania’s cities but "it is just the management that is the problem". The unplanned settlements have arisen because the city did not have the capacity to manage them and this was where UN HABITAT could help out, he said. The initiative is part of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which demand improved living conditions for people across the world. The aim of the Cities Without Slums initiative is to develop basic municipal services and upgrade the most unhealthy and vulnerable slums in order to improve the lives of at least 100 million people around the world by 2020. "The MDGs call for a decent living environment, and that cannot be done if cities develop without proper planning," Tibaijuka said. As a resident of Dar es Salaam, Tibaijuka said that the city was sprawling too rapidly, cesspits were polluting the water tables and at least 60 percent of solid waste in the city was uncollected or disposed of appropriately. She added that Dar es Salaam was one of the cities in the "absurd situation" where the wealthy people were connected to the water system but the poor were having to buy water from vendors at a higher rate. However, in signing the agreement with the government, there was now a framework within which these issues could be addressed together, she said.