UN-Habitat Syria, established in 2014, supported urban recovery planning facilitating voluntary, safe and dignified returns of populations, and assisting Syrians in the complex task of rebuilding their lives and communities. Since the collapse of the former regime in December 2024, UN-Habitat has focused its efforts on creating an enabling environment for returns of displaced populations, recovery of urban functionality and recovery of housing.
Syria has suffered from a protracted conflict since 2011, leading to massive destruction of housing and infrastructure in urban areas, as well as large scale displacement and population movements, from rural areas into cities, between cities, and within cities. This crisis has been further compounded by an economic crisis, crippling sanctions and the February 2023 earthquakes which further shook the nation. Since the collapse of the former regime in December 2024, there is renewed hope for a lasting solution to the conflict. However, complex housing, land, and property issues, in addition to the breakdown of social, economic, and basic services networks, continue to limit and restrict economic activities, returns, and recovery. UN-Habitat plays a key role in supporting recovery planning in urban areas, facilitating voluntary, safe and dignified returns of populations, and assisting Syrians in the complex task of rebuilding their lives and communities.
In Syria, the recovery of urban areas is dependent on building successful partnerships with local authorities, civil society, UN partners, and with our key donors. Urban recovery relies on enabling policies, strong donor partnerships, and coordinated urban area based responses that directly respond to locally identified priorities. Therefore, UN-Habitat Syria in an urban advisory role has heavily invested in Joint Programming to ensure coordination amongst donors and our UN partners - and in strengthening the capacity of municipalities to develop and coordinate evidence-based response plans that have been locally consulted with all stakeholders.
As the Syria conflict enters its fifth year, the “What does it take to end the crisis?” campaign is gaining momentum. The hashtag #WhatDoesItTake has already been tweeted 26,000 times and the campaign has the potential to reach 60 million people. The campaign, however, is born out of frustration with the human cost of the Syrian conflict. Frustration with the fact that humanitarian assistance was never meant to be a solution. Everyone agrees, the solution to the Syria crisis is political. As such, the current stalemate can continue for many years. Or, the situation can change overnight. The question is, if the Syria crisis ends tomorrow, is the international community ready to support peace in Syria? If it comes, peace in Syria will be a “patchwork peace”. In some areas, the fighting will continue. In others, people will start returning, rebuilding their homes, looking for jobs, wanting to send their children to school. Many people will return to cities, believing that security will be better and that health care, schools and job opportunities will be more accessible. Do we know which cities and which neighbourhoods are more likely to support returns? How will we address the complicated issue of land and property rights? In addition to physical reconstruction, what will we do to help rebuild divided societies? If it comes, peace in Syria will bring a surge of private investment, again much of it in cities. Are we engaging with business leaders to understand the opportunities and challenges from their perspective? Do we have a prioritized plan for the critical infrastructure investments necessary to support economic recovery? How will we create the kinds of jobs that can convince youth to stop fighting and begin rebuilding their lives and communities? In fact, we do not need to wait for peace in Syria. We can start now to promote stabilization and recovery. The reality is that Syria today is a patchwork. True, some areas are devastated and will require massive investment to re-build. But there are many others where small investments can make a huge difference. Many cities and neighbourhoods have been free from conflict for more than a year. These areas require a different approach – one with a stabilization, recovery and even peace-building agenda. For the past 18 months, UN-Habitat has been experimenting with just this kind of approach, through pilot projects in Aleppo, Homs and Rural Damascus. The results have been encouraging. Syrians are eager to be consulted on their priorities. They contribute their own time and money to initiatives that support their coping strategies. And they protect the investments that have been made. The message is clear: after four years of conflict, we need a new approach to peace in Syria, one that begins with Syrians themselves. While local initiatives will not bring peace in Syria, they can help create practical local alternatives to continued conflict.
Since 2007, UN-Habitat has partnered with Egypt to harness urbanization for sustainable communities. Working with the Egyptian government, it supports policies, urban planning tools, and capacity building to enhance urbanization's value. Aligned with Egypt’s Vision 2030 and the New Urban Agenda, it tailors solutions to local needs. At the 12th World Urban Forum in Cairo, November 2024, themed “It All Starts at Home,” local initiatives for sustainable cities took center stage, showcasing efforts to create inclusive, thriving communities through collaboration and innovation.
Did You Know?
In Egypt, over 240 cities host an urban population that’s heavily concentrated, representing around 14.2% of the country’s land, which creates a stark contrast in how space is utilized!
This pressure on infrastructure and services led to a growing number of urban challenges on different levels regarding housing, urban transport systems, local economic development, and adequate management of resources.
For instance, the lack of affordable, adequate, and accessible housing is leaving many low- income Egyptians living in informal areas with poor standards of living and infrastructure, with reduced access to main public services and transportation. In fact, around 40% of urban areas and 95% of rural areas in Egypt are considered unplanned.
Also, Egypt has been suffering recently from water scarcity. The situation is expected to worsen due to the population increase and climate change. Not only that, but the sanitation services also suffer from great disparities between rural and urban areas; while 91.6% of households in urban areas have access to sanitation, the percentage drops to
31.2 % in rural areas.
As a result of all the above urbanization challenges, more than 70% of the Egyptian cities are considered of low development potential (National Urban Policy), and there is a loss of return on investments and low living standards, insufficient services, and the loss of development value.
This makes working towards tackling these multi-dimensional urbanization contexts, addressing climate change, and improving the urban environment while ensuring access to basic services that contribute to social, cultural, and economic justice and development, an essential goal for UN-Habitat in Egypt.
Since its establishment, UN-Habitat in Egypt has been able to build strong partnerships with the various related stakeholders for an enhanced impact and sustainability of interventions. This partnership varies from ensuring local and community participation during the planning and implementation phases, to responding to the current urban needs by enabling dialogues that integrate knowledge from various representatives of academia, local community, NGOs, international agencies, the central and local government, such as:
Like much of the world, Egypt is witnessing rapid growth of its cities. To date 43% of the population in Egypt live in 223 cities, of which 56 % are concentrated in the Greater Cairo Region (GCR) and Alexandria. This rapid urbanization represents one of the biggest challenges that faces Egypt's urban development and is one of the main causes of the growth of informal and unsafe areas in Egypt.
However, the smartest cities today are turning these challenges into opportunities because urbanization should be considered as a driver of development rather than a problem. Cities can be engines of growth, but this is only if they are managed well and if opportunities are seized and utilized. Cities bring people closer together, benefit from economies of scale, and are a marketplace of their own - placing people, goods, and services all in close proximity. To capture this potential, we must push forward sustainable urbanization policies, policies that enable growth and at the same time create an urban development process that is able to cope with the challenges of the coming years – such as climate change, increasing demands on urban infrastructure, pollution and rapid population growth.
Sustainable urbanization is multifaceted, and it is for this reason that national urban policies must look at urban development through multiple lenses such as Planning and Design, Urban Economy, Housing and Services, and Governance. We must build and design cities that are inclusive and that are equipped for the next century. It is for this reason that UN-Habitat has been focusing on pilot interventions that result in the creation of sustainable, efficient and vibrant cities so they become engines of growth and also focuses on producing knowledge products and pilot projects that can provide evidence based research to the formulation of key policies. These dynamics are not a particularity to Egypt, but they are part of global processes. Thus UN-Habit is mobilizing the government towards the Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) which will take place in 2016 in Quito, Ecuador and it is aligning its work along the Sustainable Development Goals, especially Goal 11, to “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”
Rania Hedeya
UN-Habitat Egypt
Type Name Government Ministry of Housing, Utilities and Urban Communities ( MoHUC) Ministry of Local Development ( MoLD) Ministry of Planning (MoP) Ministry of Finance ( MoF) Government of Spain Government of Germany (BMZ) Swiss Agency for International Development (SDC) German Federal Ministry of Education and Research Governorate of Asyut Governorate of Qalyobya Governorate of Cairo Governorate of Giza Al Alamein local government New Urban Community Authority ( NUCA) General Organization of Physical Planning ( GOPP) UN Agencies The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Industrial Development Organization ( UNIDO) United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security ( UNTFHS) UN Women International Labor Organization (ILO) International Organization for Migration ( IOM) International NGOs Plan International Ford Foundation Universities and research centers Asyut University AT-Verband -Association for the Promotion of Socially & Environmentally Appropriate Technologies Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus Frankfurt/M University of Applied Sciences (Research Institute for Architecture, Civil Engineering, Geomatics) Institute for Automation and Communication (ifac), Magdeburg ifeu – Institute for Energy and Environmental Research IUWA Heidelberg Institute for Future Energy Systems (IZES, Saarbrücken) Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences, Campus Suderburg University of Stuttgart (Institute of Energy Economics and the Rational Use of Energy(IER) Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Local NGOs and CBOs Nahdet Khayrallah NGO Elshehab NGO Tadamon NGO Hawa El mostakbal NGO
Sudan has been experiencing long-lasting conflicts and tribal disputes particularly in five Darfur States as well as three Southern States including Blue Nile, South Kordofan and West Kordofan. To respond to the uprising challenges and economic opportunities in Sudan, UN-Habitat has been working on humanitarian, peace building and development assistance for the Government of Sudan.
In Sudan, a large influx of population from rural to urban areas has been obviously accelerated due to the complexity of the country’s political, social and environmental challenges and opportunities. Sudan also has a high percentage of informal settlements and developments that has also caused urban challenges.
In the field of urban legislation, land and governance, the Government has been facing two key challenges. Firstly, a lack of National Urban Policy and its implementation strategy. Secondly, a strong desire of practical land resolution mechanism and land registration system.
UN-Habitat Sudan has been actively engaging with key government counterparts both in federal and state level, key UN agencies, donor communities and international/national organizations in the country. In compliance with Sudan UNDAF 2018-2021 and Humanitarian Response Plan, UN-Habitat Sudan Office has been working under the coordination of Sudan United Nations Country Team (UNCT) and Humanitarian Coordination Team (HCT) in order to assist bridging humanitarian response and development support in line with the principle of Humanitarian, Peace Building and Development Nexus.
Sudan is a post-conflict country that aspires to forge and maintain a sustainable peace. According to different studies, the rapid urbanization process observed in Sudan has been determined by four main factors. These are the massive flows of rural-urban migration and displacement due to extended conflicts which afflicted certain parts of the country; the ensuing natural disasters, especially drought and its consequences; the complex pattern of the country’s political development since independence and the inadequate state of rural development in the country resulting from territorial-imbalanced development.
While cities and towns in Sudan face many challenges, urbanization processes offer an opportunity to trigger sustainable processes of development, harnessing the capacity and aspirations of the people from urban areas. Achieving sustainable urbanization will therefore require attending, in a balanced manner, the needs of cities and towns as well as of those peri-urban and rural areas with which they have mutually dependent social, economic and environmental interactions.
In this context the Sudanese government will embark on the formulation and development of an integrated strategy for urbanization based on partnership with the private sector and community participation. Preliminary steps and actions has already been taken with respect to the preparation of the project document, initial funding was allocated by the government and a number of donors were approached for funding. The main objectives of the strategy are:
Wael al-Ashhab
UN-Habitat Sudan
All of UN-Habitat Sudan’s projects are developed, implemented and monitored in partnership with the relevant Sudanese ministries to ensure they are in line with the National Development Plan and it’s priorities. To institutionalize the relation with the main government counterpart, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between UN-Habitat and the Federal Government of Sudan (GoS) in November 2010 and renewed in January 2015, with the main purpose of establishing a framework for collaborative efforts on national development programmes and activities related to sustainable urbanization and to harmonize physical planning in Sudan. It should enable both partners to identify common interest and priorities. UN-Habitat has provided technical and financial assistance to the national government of Sudan and the National Habitat Committee for the formulation of the national report for the 3rd United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) based on the guidelines provided. The national report was prepared on a bottom-up participatory approach and brought together relevant Sudanese public officials from federal and state governments, representatives from civil society organizations, academia, research institutions, media, the United Nations and international donors, private sector and community groups. The national report was finally approved by the government of Sudan.
UN-Habitat, the United Nations city agency, has been engaged with the Arab States region for over 30 years and over this period, UN-Habitat has expanded its operation to more than 10 countries in the region.
This brochure presents an overview of UN-Habitat's engagement in the region, reflecting in what was achieved, how it was achieved, how it was made possible, and what lies ahead especially in these times of change.
