Across Somalia, a vicious combination of conflict and natural disaster such as draught and flooding have caused 2.6 million persons to leave their home in recent years. Nearly half, 1 million, are displaced in central and southern Somalia, namely in Jubaland, South-West and Hirshabelle.

With the vast majority of Internally Displaced Persons residing and intending to remain in urban areas, the efforts to provide Durable Solutions must be ramped up.

Based on the global and Arab housing strategies, Egypt is on the lead drawing a road map towards achieving the goals of adequate housing for all. In 2014, Egypt started preparing the Egyptian Housing Profile as a first step to monitor and analyze the sector’s components and challenges in Egypt. This was conducted with the participation of all governmental agencies, academic entities and representatives of relevant local communities.

The UN-Habitat Housing Practices Series is an ongoing publication developed and produced by UN-Habitat in partnership with academic institutions and National Governments. It provides reliable and independent documentation of innovative and large-scale affordable housing programmes in countries around the world.

In cities and urban areas in East Africa, livelihoods and incomes of populations are seriously affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for those living in informal settlements. These urban populations are more vulnerable to food insecurity and unstable livelihoods as they mainly depend on the informal sector. It is estimated that the number of food insecure people in East Africa will increase to more than 41 million people because of COVID-19 including 14 million urban dwellers.

The UN Secretary-General has launched the UN Comprehensive Response to COVID-19 to save lives, protect societies, recover better. As part of the response, the UN Secretary-General is issuing policy briefs to provide ideas to governments on how to address the consequences of this crisis and COVID-19 in an urban world is part of this series .

This decongestion note has been jointly developed by Shelter Cluster, CCCM Cluster and UN-Habitat Somalia and outlines the overall guidance for the decongestion and upgrading IDP settlements to reduce the impact of COVID-19 pandemic.
Somalia has 2.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have limited access to quality essential healthcare, water and sanitation services and live in more than 2,000 sites in crowded living conditions in urban and semi-urban areas. COVID-19…

Local authorities have played a major role to curtail COVID-19, particularly in vulnerable urban settings, while maintaining critical services.
To identify problems and suggest solutions, UN-Habitat assessed 34 Unions of Municipalities and 5 individual municipalities, covering 52 per cent of Lebanese municipalities. The report highlights key urban challenges and proposes several mitigating measures.

COVID-19, a global pandemic declared by the World Health Organization (WHO), is crippling the global economy and upending people’s lives thereby threatening sustainable development across all its dimensions. Africa is also facing the dire consequences of the crisis, necessitating timely response, recovery and rebuilding policies and strategies. Globally, urban areas are the epicenters of the epidemic accounting for most of the confirmed COVID-19 cases.

UN-Habitat has been active in the Somalia urban sector for more than 30 years to promote sustainable and participatory urban development. Responding to the implementation of Somalia National Development Plan 9 and Somaliland National Development Plan II, UN-Habitat’s interventions in Somalia focuses on durable solutions for IDP’s, strengthening urban planning and municipal finance to address urbanization challenges and at the same time enhance service delivery capacity; and to improve…