How the United Nations Settlements Programme is planning to deal with an influx of urban migration during a global housing crisis.

Over the next 30 years, 2.2 billion people are expected to move to cities, all during a global housing crisis. This will increase the proportion of the global population that resides in a city from 56 percent in 2021 to 68 percent. This will strain the urban environment even further, and managing this enormous transition will require strategic urban planning to ensure that residents have access to safe and affordable housing, transport systems, green spaces, and clean air.?

To manage this trend, the United Nations (UN) Member States made a commitment with Sustainable Development Goal 11 to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable by 2030. However, the world is not on track to reach this goal. Still today, one quarter of the urban population lives in slums, about 1.1 billion people globally. Moreover, in the Least Developed Countries, only 4 out of 10 individuals have convenient access to public transportation.??

The UN entity at the centre of this work is the UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme) (UN-Habitat). MOPAN recently released an assessment of UN-Habitat that looks at its efficacy and preparedness to confront this challenge. The recent assessment found that UN-Habitat has made significant improvement since the last MOPAN assessment in 2016, especially around improving internal fiduciary systems. However, the assessment also identified continued room for improvement, notably regarding how UN-Habitat can better reflect the value of its results. Though UN-Habitat is in a better financial situation than during the last MOPAN assessment, seeing an increase in voluntary contributions, achieving consistent and flexible funding will be critical to its work of creating sustainable urban development.??

It's important to understand how UN-Habitat approaches its work. UN-Habitat combines normative work, operational work, advocacy, and partnerships. The breakdown looks like this:??

• Normative work involves research, capacity building, standards setting and monitoring to develop norms, principles, standards and frameworks.??
• Operational work refers to tangible, technical projects on the ground, undertaken ideally with reference to those normative guidelines.??
• Advocacy involves communication and outreach with the objective of mobilising public, political, and financial support and collaborative action to inspire change.??
• Partnerships involve collaboration with governments, other UN and intergovernmental agencies, civil society, foundations, academia, and the private sector.???

With its current Strategic Plan, UN-Habitat managed to combine these different ways of working to increase its impact. For example, it created internal structures to ensure that projects in cities around the world are informed by global norms and standards. UN-Habitat also bolstered its capacity to partner with networks of cities and mayors to enable them to implement global standards and norms back in their hometowns. UN-Habitat also developed a new Theory of Change based on four mutually reinforcing domains of change, which focused on reduced inequality, shared prosperity, climate action and crisis prevention in an urban context.???

?Over the last five years, UN-Habitat also expanded its influence by collaborating more closely with other UN agencies. In 2018, the UN Secretary-General launched a reform to promote the coherence among the different UN entities that work on sustainable development. This reform strengthened the role of small UN entities, such as UN-Habitat, to ensure that the UN could draw on their expertise even if they have a limited presence in some countries. Thanks to this reform, UN-Habitat was able to increase its contribution to the UN’s system-wide analysis and planning at the country level.??

UN-Habitat also faces a number of challenges.??

With its current Strategic Plan, UN-Habitat initiated a reform that introduced a new organisational structure at headquarters in Nairobi and increased presence at the regional level. However, the organisation did not mobilise sufficient resources to fully implement the new structure. This mismatch between the approved structure and available resources reduced UN-Habitat’s impact and capacity to evaluate and oversee its operational projects. For example, UN-Habitat generates a wide range of knowledge products, tools and guidelines that are acknowledged by partners as high quality. Yet due to funding constraints, these are not well curated or disseminated to reach their full potential. Moreover, a low level of evaluative evidence undermines the ability of UN-Habitat to analyse results and engage in organisational learning or adequately represent its real accomplishments.??

UN-Habitat stands at a defining moment.?

In 2024, UN-Habitat’s new Executive Director, Ms. Anacláudia Rossbach, was appointed by the UN’s General Assembly. Concurrently, UN-Habitat and Member States are working to develop a new Strategic Plan, which will guide the organisation over the period 2026-2029. Over this period, it is crucial that UN-Habitat delivers on a renewed commitment to organisational excellence and accountability. This means instilling a continuous improvement culture and driving accountability through public transparency, robust performance management, and strong governance, risk, and compliance frameworks. Delivering on this commitment has the potential to create a positive spiral by inspiring trust and encouraging donors to provide more flexible resources, which can in turn be used to further strengthen the performance of the organisation.???

At the same time, this performance journey will not be possible without buy-in and participation from UN-Habitat’s Member States. To strengthen internal oversight functions, UN-Habitat would need dedicated funds to recruit and retain adequate staff. In 2018, Member State oversight was strengthened with the creation of the UN-Habitat Assembly and the UN-Habitat Executive Board. Going forward, Member States would need to combine the strengthened oversight with increased investments in UN-Habitat’s organisational excellence to ensure that the increasing number of city residents have access to affordable housing, transport systems, green spaces, and clean air.??

We invite you to read our full assessment of UN-Habitat, available on the MOPAN website.