The influx of rural workers heading to Asia's booming cities in search of employment is fuelling a rise in the number of slum-dwellers, US-based Habitat for Humanity said Tuesday.
Sixty percent of the world's slum-dwellers are from Asia, where an estimated 554 million people currently live in slums with virtually no basic sanitation and clean water, the international aid group said. "The situation of housing and water and sanitation in Asia is the most serious," said Rick Hathaway, Habitat for Humanity's vice president for the Asia Pacific.
"Urbanisation is accelerating faster in Asia than anywhere else and if you look at the statistics, as cities are growing in Asia, the number of people living in slums is growing at the same rate," he told AFP. According to the group, urban growth in the region is set to outpace the rest of the world over the next 25 years, with 2.65 billion people expected to live in cities by 2030.
Most of the new city-dwellers are also likely to be among the poorest, living in slums where houses are constructed out of substandard materials with poor sanitation, it said. In most cases, these houses are built by the occupants in hazardous locations with a high risk of eviction. "So it tells you that nearly all of that urbanisation is amongst the poorest of the poor," said Hathaway.
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