Introduction, Mila Freire. Part I: City Management and Strategy: Globalization and the new urban challenge, Yeung Yue-man The challenges of peri-urban growth in East Asia: the case of China Hangzhou-Ningbo Corridor, Douglas Webster and Larissa Muller Planning Singapore growth for better living, Belinda Yuen Strategic management and citizen empowerment: the Naga City experience, Jesse Robredo City strategy and governance, Mila Freire and Angela Griffin. Part II: Finance and Budget Issues: From conceptual framework to practice: the municipal budget, Markus Stadler Decentralization, devolution and development in the Philippines, Alex Brillantes, Jr Revenue sources of local governments: nature and determinants, Robert Ebel and Francois Vaillancourt The private sector in water and sanitation, Penelope J. Brook and Nicola Tynan. Part III: Land, Poverty and Other Issues: Strengthening local government capacities in urban planning and finance: lessons from the East Asia city development strategies, Nathaniel von Einsiedel Industrial estate planning and development: case studies, Seetoh Kum Chun The city poverty assessment: a primer, Jesko Hentschel and Radha Seshigirl Preserving the cultural (built) heritage of cities, Heng Chye Klang. Resume: Lessons Learned, Belinda Yuen.
The ESRDF, one of the biggest projects funded by the World Bank in Ethiopia, was established on 13 February 1996. It was designed to provide financial and technical support to poor, mainly rural and women communities and community groups, to construct or rehabilitate and maintain basic economic and social infrastructure and services, as well as environmental conservation actions that they prioritized and in which they are willing to invest. In its technical support ESRDF was envisaged to give greater emphasis on strengthening community capacity in project identification, implementation and maintenance. ESRDF is a semi autonomous office and was organized on a decentralized basis. It has a central office and eleven regional offices, including Addis Ababa. The organizational structure employed at all levels is very slim and the staffing consists of a few qualified technical specialists. ESRDF has been operational for the last six years (1996-2002), and the theme of this paper is to go over its success towards achieving one of its top objectives, i.e. community empowerment, by taking ESRDF-Addis Ababa Regional Office as a case study. The ESRDF – Addis Ababa RO has assisted a total of 191 community-initiated projects technically and financially. They have focused on primary education, primary health care, environmental sanitation and development, capacity building and training and income generation. The paper is thus primarily focusing on the extent to which the office’s intervention brings about the enabling environment for communities to decide what their priorities are, to enable them to form their internal committees and elect representatives accountable to them, to participate actively in planning, implementation, management and maintenance of their projects, and to have considerable women’s participation in the decision-making process of communities’ actions in general and activities directly affecting their lives in particular. In order to give life to the discussion in the paper, facts about sub-projects that are relevant to the discussed topics will be demonstrated and presented. At the end of the paper, concluding remarks and recommendations concerning policy implications of community empowerment to the realization of poverty reduction strategy programs in Addis Ababa will be drawn.
The term "development finance \n institutions" (DFI) encompasses no only government \n development banks, but also nongovernmental micro-finance \n organizations, that match grants to attempt to promote \n community development, decentralization of power, and local \n empowerment. Measures of the social cost of DFIs that \n receive public funds, help to check whether DFIs are good \n uses of public funds, i.e., if the social benefit of a DFI \n exceeds the social cost, then public funds are indeed \n well-spent, further improving social welfare. This report \n describes the measurement of costs but not of benefits; but \n even without knowledge of benefits, knowledge of costs can \n help to adequately spend funds. Two measures of social cost \n are presented: first, the Subsidy Dependence Index (SDI) - \n the ratio of subsidy received to revenue from loans; and, \n subsidy is the social cost of the public funds used to run a \n DFI - which does not discount flows, rather it works in \n short time frames, or when the rate of time preference is \n low; second, the Net Present Cost to Society (NPCs) - like \n standard present-value measures, it discounts cash flows, \n and works in any time frame. Both SDI and NPCs are tools, to \n help establish benchmarks, chart trends, and compare a DFI \n with identical clients, and services. It is stipulated that \n measurement of the social cost of public DFIs matters \n because funds earmarked for development are scarce, while \n subsidies for DFIs could be adequate, provided social \n welfare improves in a broader scale.
This study investigates the workings of the informal housing market and the ways house building is facilitated and financing obtained among lower-income households in a metropolitan area experiencing exploding population growth and decentralization. In capturing the dynamics of informal housing development, the study examines market operations in relation to the practice of location-permitting intended to facilitate access to land for formal housing development. Also studied is the inaccessibility of formal housing finance by households acquiring homes in the informal-sector. The study creates its own operational definition of informal housing market and segments the total market into submarkets useful for analysis. Using a multi-clustered stratified sampling technique, data for this study were randomly collected through an in-depth interview with households residing in selected informal settlements in the Botabek area on the fringe of Jakarta. The study findings indicate that: (1) the increasing amount of scattered informal land development in Botabek is at least partially a consequence of location-permit regulation which has forced a correspondingly large proportion of households to construct homes illegally; (2) the majority of households who participate in the informal market do so in order to avoid cumbersome and costly land titling registration and building permit processes; (3) mortgage loans are inaccessible to the majority of informal-sector households due to rigid requirements towards loan collateral and employment status of informal-sector households. The findings also indicate that: (1) The building cost of staged-construction (where the notions of self-help housing and saving while building are articulated) is much more affordable than that of conventional construction in either the informal market or the formal market; (2) Dwelling units in the informal market built using either staged construction or conventional construction, whether in areas under location-permit or not under location-permit, are generally of acceptable quality. However, the informal market will never provide total housing packages because informal settlements are generally built without adequate public services, such as drinking water, and sanitation and sewage facilities. Lack of tenure security for the majority of dwelling units in informal settlements makes it difficult for these settlements to obtain public services. The study concludes that to provide affordable houses for the majority of informal-sector households, the land titling procedure and regulatory permits governing formal housing markets should be reformed and informal-sector households' constraints to access formal housing finance must be lifted. For households using staged construction, all of these changes should be done in concert with the provision of new financing arrangements, possibly in the form of a line of credit, where a loan is drawn as a supplement to household savings from living in incomplete houses.
Abstract Since Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980, the country's leaders have embarked on an ambitious programme of decentralization and local government reform. At the same time, urban conditions in the country have become increasingly difficult. This paper examines major aspects of urban local government finances in this environment of reform and growing fiscal pressures, with special reference to the experience of Harare City Council. It is argued that some relative successes have been recorded, although a number of undesirable elements of colonial practices and various fiscal problem persist.
With the increasingly rapid urban growth in Nigeria in recent decades, and with its consequent multiplication and complication of the urban problems of traffic and transport, housing, health, and sanitation, the need for a more purposeful planning and management of cities has come to attract increased public policy attention. The institutional and organizational setting for city planning and management, particularly the role of municipal governments in these activities, still remain colonial and therefore ill-suited to the demands of present urban developments. City planning and management responsibilities are so fragmented among so many institutions and organizations that the municipal local governments have had very little authority over what happens in the city. The overlapping responsibilities of the various institutions make for conflicts and the net result is general inefficiency in the planning and management of many cities. The recent (1976) Local Government Reforms which aimed at decentralizing some functions from the state and federal governments to local governments do not seem to have altered the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and city management matters. The aim of this paper is to put the origin of the weak position of municipal governments in city planning and management into political and historical perspective. It also seeks to argue that until city planning and management responsibilities are centralized on strong, autonomous municipal governments, headed by popularly elected urban chief executives, the present chaos in Nigerian cities is likely to continue.