Business Daily (Nairobi)
Zeddy Sambu
23 October 2007
Nairobi has been rated among the world's 25 fastest growing large cities, signalling that failure to plan may aggravate urban problems such as the rise of slums.
London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) indicates that the city's population has grown from 1.8 in 1999 to 3.5 million.
Mr Peter Kibinda, the director for city planning, said City Hall was reviewing development policies for residential areas to deal with rapid expansion of the city's 20 zones.
Last year, pressure on existing social facilities forced the council to freeze development in some of the upmarket estates.
The IIED report also reviewed 70 per cent national censuses and found that the world's urban map is rapidly being redrawn. A review of the global population over 50 years period, (between 1950 and 2000 ) shows that 30 cities grew more than 20-fold. The speed with which a city's population grows is usually measured by its annual average population growth rate.
Dubbed the "million-cities", the capitals include: Abidjan, Conakry, Faridabad, Kaduna, Karaj, Kolwezi, Las Vegas, Lusaka, Shenzhen, Ulsan and Yaounde, Dar es Salaam, Dhaka, Jeddah, Khartoum, Khulna, Kinshasa, Lagos, Nairobi, Niamey, Ouagadougou, Riyadh, Santa Cruz, Tijuana and Toluca.
The United Nations Population Fund projections indicate that more than half of the world's population will live in urban areas by June, next year.
David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow in IIED's human settlements group who authored the report, said Kenya's decline in urban poverty compares favourabley with those of most countries in the region.
In Kenyan towns, 22.8 per cent of the population live below the $1 poverty line, a rank higher than Zambia's 75.8 per cent, Nigeria's (70.8 per cent) and Tanzania's 57.8 per cent.
Kenya's food poverty line-according to the 2007 Economic Survey, is estimated at consuming 2, 250 kilocalories per day per adult equivalent.
"Using this approach, the food poverty lines in monthly adult equivalent terms are Sh988 and Sh1,474 for rural and urban areas respectively.
The overall poverty lines were Sh1,562 and Sh2,913 for rural and urban areas.
Despite the progress that Kenya has made in the fight against impoverishment in the recent past, the report says the incidence of food poverty in urban areas increased from 38.3 per cent , in 1997, to 41 per cent by last December.
Of the three biggest towns, Nairobi is the least food poor, while in Nakuru and Mombasa one in two persons has below the minimum food energy requirements.
"Urban residents of Nakuru are about two and a half times more likely to be poor compared to their counterparts in Nairobi," says the report.
Asia now has half the world's urban population while Africa has surpassed Northern America with Europe on a steep decline.
"Most of Europe's great centres of industry are no longer among the world's largest cities and most of the future growth in urban areas will be in low and middle income countries, "says the report released yesterday.
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