Thanks to housing built by UN-Habitat, this mother can now safely shelter her family.
Since 2015, Burkina Faso has been facing an unprecedented security crisis caused by armed groups with hundreds of violent attacks in several localities across its territory. One of the major consequences of this crisis is the forced displacement of predominantly rural populations to better-secured so-called secondary urban centers (regional and provincial capitals). According to official figures, Burkina Faso had 2,062,534 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) on March 31, 2023, representing almost 10% of its population.
Since 2015, the security crisis has driven thousands of people from their villages.
This movement of people to urban areas is taking place against the backdrop of an increasingly accelerated urbanization process over the last twenty years, which has finally outstripped the capacity of institutions to manage it, resulting in the disorderly growth of cities and the emergence of informal settlements (the “non-houstis”) with poor living conditions and limited access to basic urban services such as health, education and drinking water.
All this has reduced the capacity of cities to function effectively as economic engines and to provide services and opportunities for development and fulfillment for all their populations and those of the surrounding rural areas. This also brings with it the risk of the emergence of the phenomenon of urban marginality, and with it a spiral of deteriorating living conditions, rising poverty and even crime, as has been the case in many countries in the region and around the world.
Families living for months or years in Temporary shelters
At the same time, this process of urbanization, if well managed, is an opportunity to improve the quality of life of the entire Burkinabe population, as cities become more efficient in the provision of services and opportunities, and to gradually transform the country's economic matrix towards sectors with greater added value, without however losing its foundations in agriculture and the sustainable exploitation of natural resources.
The fact that Burkina Faso has a well-balanced network of human settlements, with a large second city, dynamic secondary towns and a large number of small towns and villages well distributed throughout the territory, should enable it to occupy it rationally, to strengthen the more buoyant urban economic activities close to the places where raw materials are produced, and to enable the entire population, even the rural population, to access services and opportunities and thus avoid too great a concentration in a single large city.
It's also an opportunity for each city in the network to manage its growth so as to develop properly, by planning its infrastructure and structuring facilities and its expansion zones, and by putting in place the management and financing mechanisms needed to implement them. At the same time, it's an opportunity to make up for deficits in informal areas and integrate them into the city's development.
This approach can also help to reduce the environmental impact of cities and strengthen their resilience, particularly in the face of climate change, as well as reducing inequalities, particularly those linked to gender, and taking advantage of the demographic dividend.
Operating in Burkina Faso for some forty years, UN-Habitat works closely with the Ministry of Urban Planning, Land Affairs and Housing, the Ministry in charge of Humanitarian Action and local authorities. For more than four (4) years, the organization has been supporting the Government in its humanitarian response to the security crisis that the country has been experiencing since 2015, and refers in its actions to the strategic documents that are the organization's New Urban Agenda and Strategic Plan 2020-2025.
The classrooms built by UN-Habitat has enabled a lot of IDP children go back to school.
One of the responses provided by UN-Habitat is the construction of socio-collective infrastructures (schools, dispensaries, maternity wards, boreholes) and 312 decent, sustainable homes for vulnerable populations (displaced persons and hosts) in the communes of Kaya, Dori, Kongoussi and Tougouri, thanks to funding from the European Union. In the coming months, the organization will launch work on the construction of a further 300 homes in Boussouma and Nagréongo, with funding from the Japanese government.
312 homes built by UN-Habitat to provide shelter for the Vulnerable
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