In the world today, one in eight people or 1 billion people on earth live in slums.
The proportion of slum dwellers is most acute in Africa (at 55.9 per cent), followed by Asia (at 27.9 per cent), and Latin America and the Caribbean (at 21.1 per cent)
Informal settlements are increasingly found in the developed world too.
One fifth of slum households are headed by women who are often the poorest and most vulnerable