A 6-week series of international video-conferences
was organized by SIGUS for the World Bank's Thematic Group on Services for
the Poor in the Spring of 2000. Key staff of the major development agencies
focused on how to accelerate and expand urban poverty alleviation through
slum improvement efforts. The sessions featured interchanges from around the
world focusing on the growing critical situation of deteriorated urban communities.
Each session featured a presentation by a development agency on its experience
and thinking on scaling-up slum upgrading programs. Agencies participating
included the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), US Agency for International
Development (USAID) and the World Bank from Washington D.C.; UNCHS-Habitat,
from Nairobi, Kenya; German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), from Frankfurt,
Germany; British Department of International Development (DFID) from New Delhi,
India; and SIGUS-MIT from Boston.
The
videoconference series was the first under the "Cities Without Slums"
initiative, a multi-donor effort to address the challenge of urban poverty
through slum upgrading. The series was developed under the sponsorship of
the Cities Alliance, a global partnership spearheaded by UNCHS (Habitat) and
the World Bank.
In conjunction with this videoconference series, and as a way to permit participants
to continue discussing and collaborating between videoconferences, a parallel
electronic conference was set up in the World Bank's electronic discussion
facility, the Development Forum.
Schools and other interested groups were also offered the opportunity to connect
to the video conference sessions as passive viewers, and many schools from
around the world participated.