Events

Shelter, the Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI) initiative at the Centre for Policy Research is pleased to invite you to the second Policy Lab on: ‘Urban Poor Communities and COVID-19 – Inclusive Policies and Practice for Improved Urban Resilience’

The session will be online via Zoom. To register, kindly fill this form.

The session will also be live-streamed on CPR’s Facebook page.

In case of any issues and for any queries, please email at sci-fi@cprindia.org.

Globally, the COVID-19 case count continues to climb. Even as the pandemic persists, a recent sero-surveillance in Mumbai, India study shows that urban poor communities have experienced an infection rate that is 3.5 times higher than their counterparts. Caught off guard, cities across South Asia are having to respond to the pandemic, as well as, to the vulnerabilities of urban poor communities exacerbated in its wake by providing livelihood support, combatting food insecurity, and creating emergency water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure. While this ‘response’ phase may last well into the medium-term, a discourse on ‘Building Back Better’ is rapidly emerging. Aligned with the Sustainable Development Goal 11 to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, the need for resilience-thinking has only been underscored by the pandemic.

From a resilience perspective, urban poor communities experience any citywide chronic stresses such as water insecurity and acute risks like disasters more severely. The chronic WASH-related stresses not only produce adverse outcomes for health, productivity, and well-being in urban poor communities, but also exacerbate the acute risks engendered by the pandemic. Yet, systems for WASH find an inadequate mention in national and international resilience and recovery frameworks beyond emergency planning. Given its twofold criticality, it is imperative to introduce a paradigm shift and situate WASH centrally within the discourse on citywide resilience and urban poor communities.

The present Policy Lab, ‘Inclusive Policies and Practice for Improved Urban Resilience’ will discuss the role of water and sanitation in enhancing the resilience of urban poor communities. The Lab will aim to learn from novel approaches to WASH service delivery for urban poor communities to inform the framework and action for citywide resilience.

AGENDA

About the Policy Labs
The present Policy Lab is the first in a series of four titled, Urban Poor Communities & COVID-19 – New Urban WASH Priorities for South Asian Governments, jointly organised by WaterAid, UNICEF, Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, and the Scaling City Institution for India (SCI-FI) initiative at CPR. The series will bring together a diverse group of stakeholders including national and local governments, practitioners, researchers, and the civil society to deliberate on strategies for improving WASH for urban poor communities, and in turn, unlocking the urban resilience of cities across South Asia.

Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI)
The Water and Sanitation initiative under the SCI-FI initiative seeks to understand diverse reasons for poor water and sanitation and to examine how these might be related to technology, service delivery models, questions of institutions, governance, finance, and socio-economic dimensions. The SCI-FI: Water and Sanitation initiative seeks to support national, state, and city authorities to develop policies and programmes for intervention with the goal of increasing access to safe and sustainable sanitation in both urban and rural areas. The SCI-FI initiative is nested at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) since 2013.