Babatunde Fashola, Nigeria’s minister for power, works and housing, has urged Africa and its leaders to see agriculture and farming as sustainable tools for urbanisation, saying urbanisation is essential for cities and towns to evolve properly.
He made this call in the belief that one of the key solutions to creating sustainable cities and urban areas should happen hundreds of miles away from the city in the rural areas, “after all, it’s the people in rural areas that will produce the food that the people in the city will eat”.
Fashola who made the call in his opening speech at the on-going African Regional Preparatory Conference at third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat iii) in Abuja Thursday, said African farmers needed to be encouraged and supported to stay and grow food, employ local people, and provide food security for all.
“The best investment in public goods, including public health, education and infrastructure has traditionally been around the cities and the big towns. Let’s take a closer look at that, and turn it around”, he advised, stressing that the federal government in Nigeria was committed to agriculture, to diversify its economy as well as take the real economy to those who have struggled on the margins of society and headed for the urban centres.
The Habitat III conference, scheduled to hold in Quito, Ecuador in October this year, will be next in the 20-year cycle of global summits convened to address the growing challenges arising from unprecedented urbanisation, notably in Africa and other developing regions of the world.
The Abuja Regional Preparatory Conference, aimed to chart a sustainable path for Africa’s urban future, is the second in the series of regional summits expected to harvest regional priorities that will ultimately form the new global urban agenda. The first in the series, the Habitat III Asia-Pacific Regional Meeting, was held in October last year in Jakarta, Republic of Indonesia.
Today, it is estimated that half of the world’s population is living in cities, compared with less than five percent a century ago, with projections indicating that, by 2050, as many as 6.4 billion people, or 70 percent of the world’s total population, will be living in urban centres with 95 percent of this expansion expected to take place in developing countries – mostly in Asia and Africa.
Fashola hoped that, in consonance with the expectations of UN HABITAT, the regional conference would produce far-reaching policy recommendations and a clear-cut set of declarations that would enrich the New Urban Agenda and bring visible profit to Africa.
“The signs of a Renaissance in the African response to the urbanisation challenge and the opportunities inherent in them for inclusion, sustainability, and unprecedented growth were clearly visible at the meeting of African Union Ministers of Housing and Urban Development held yesterday”, he enthused.
He further called on Africans to use the opportunity of the conference to work more closely together, emphasizing that “African cities are our cities, so it’s up to us to lead the way in defining the future for them. Let us seize this moment to share ideas and experiences with ourselves and with our friends from outside the continent”.
“No progress happens in a vacuum, so we all need the support of the international community in our quest for development. As Africans, we must work together to understand our common challenges so that we can better collaborate with our partners from around the world”, he added.
CHUKA UROKO
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