USAID's Urban

About USAID’s Urban Work We support healthier and more livable cities for all people, driven by an inclusive, climate-resilient, and circular economy. ****URBANIZATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES**** Ensuring sustainable and equitable urbanization in the developing world is an urgent priority. Cities are already home to more than half of the world’s population, and the proportion is expected to rise to two-thirds by 2050. Well-managed cities can serve as powerful engines of economic opportunity, innovation, and progress. Conversely, poorly managed and chaotic urban development can undermine economic growth, and threaten security through increased crime, violence, and extremism. Rapid urbanization also affects multiple global crises including climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, pollution, and food and water security. The fast growth in population and size of cities is often greater than the ability of national and local governments to plan for, build, and manage the accompanying changes. Currently, over one billion people live in slums, densely packed informal urban settlements with limited access to safe housing, stable employment opportunities, basic services (such as electricity, sanitation, and drinking water), transport, technology, healthcare, and education. On top of this lack of access to services and resources, people living in slums typically experience high exposure to pollution, natural hazards, and climate-related disasters. Local governments are also powerful vehicles for democracy to deliver a better quality of life to all people. They are typically the least capacitated in both human and financial resources, but have tremendous responsibility as service providers, first responders in a crisis, and the most immediate representatives of the people. * * * - While Asia is home to over two-thirds of the world’s slum dwellers, Sub-Saharan Africa is growing faster than any other region in the world and over 60 percent of Africa’s urban residents live in slums. - Although cities are engines of economic growth and the urban-rural wage gap is generally high, the urban poor do not reap these benefits of urbanization. Cities are more expensive than rural areas, and the urban poor can pay up to half of their incomes on food, resulting in food insecurity and malnutrition. - The urban poor largely have low-income and unstable jobs in the informal sector; in African cities over 80% of jobs are in the informal sector with no social benefits. - Urban residents generate 80 percent of global GDP, but they also consume more than 75% of the world’s natural resources, produce over 50 percent of solid waste, and emit up to 60 percent of greenhouse gases. - Only half the world’s urban population has access to public transportation, increasing time burdens, cost, and exposure to toxic air pollution for the poorest, and limiting access to economic opportunity, especially for women. - Cities, especially the urban poor, are at the center of a growing health and climate crisis caused by air pollution, which is the largest environmental health risk in the world; more than six million people die annually from air pollution-related causes, more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. - Each year, 11 million metric tons of plastic waste leaks into the ocean, most from rapidly growing cities and towns along rivers and coastal areas in the developing world where waste management systems, infrastructure, and governments struggle to keep pace with growing populations and increasing amounts of waste. **Urban Issues** We focus on systems-based, holistic approaches to improve development impact across sectors in the context of urbanization. Explore our key issues to find issue briefs, projects, research, and other resources on urban’s cross-sector impact.