With rapidly increasing urban populations, cities in Africa are faced with enormous challenges and will have to find ways to facilitate by 2015 urban services, livelihoods and housing for more than twice as many urban dwellers than it has today.

The State of the African Cities 2010 goes above and beyond the first report, which provided a general overview of housing and urban management issues in Africa.

The Global Report on Human Settlements is the most authoritative and up-to-date global assessment of human settlements conditions and trends. It is an essential reference for researchers, academics, public authorities and civil society organizations all over the world.

This report adopts the concept of Harmonious Cities as a theoretical framework in order to understand today’s urban world, and also as an operational tool to confront the most important challenges facing urban areas and their development processes.

This book is written for developing countries. Since it seeks to encourage the designing of waste collection systems based on local information, the approach is valid in any country.

Local governments are increasingly realizing the importance and benefits of addressing gender equality and equity in their decision making, policies, programmes and services. Many are rising to the challenge.

Only recently have world leaders paid attention to the crisis of slums. In 2000, one of the Millennium Development Goals called for ''improving the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers''. But the goal is far too modest. Already, since 2000, the population of slum dwellers has increased by the same figure. And it is estimated that 180,000 people are added to the urban population everyday.

The practice of forcibly evicting people from their homes and settlements is a growing global phenomenon and represents a crude violation of one of the most elementary principles of the right to adequate housing as defined in the Habitat Agenda and international instruments.

Urbanization in the last 20 years has become one of the most important trends in human settlement development and the prospects of all developing countries continue to be deeply affected by rapid urban population growth. While Africa was 80% rural in the 1950s and 1960s, its rate of urbanization now stands on average at 50% and the trend is expected to continue over the coming years (UN-HABITAT, 1996).

Introduction of participatory budgeting can be a sound vehicle in realizing good governance and fighting poverty. It is a mechanism that involves elected leaders, public officials, service providers, and non-state actors – civil society, private sector and development partners.

Facilitation Methods, covers introduction and implementation of participatory budgeting with expamples and experiences from eastern and southern Africa, Latin America and Europe. It also discusses the main constraints to implementing participatory budgeting in Africa

Rebuilding personal and collective confidences through a participatory process takes time, especially amidst the massive personal tragedy of lost loved ones, personal assets and livelihoods. This photo and film documentation is testimony of all that we have all learned during the past two years.