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October 19, 2016
Social housing at the core of the SDGs by Jessica Faieta



On behalf of the SDG Fund, I am delighted to welcome you all to this important discussion on putting housing and cities at the centre of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

The SDG Fund has played a pioneering role in this direction. The SDG Fund, a multi-agency and multi-donor mechanism established in 2014 by UNDP, on behalf of the UN System, is aligning the efforts of different actors for achieving the SDGs. It is the first mechanism established specifically for SDG achievement and is already devising new platforms for joint engagement of UN Agencies, governments, civil society, businesses and communities in sustainable development with its work on the ground. The SDG Fund currently has programmes in 22 countries around the world thanks to the financial contributions to its programmes by more than 20 countries.

Last year, world leaders approved at the United Nations General Assembly a new agenda for sustainable development: the 2030 Agenda and its accompanying 17 sustainable development goals.

This universal agenda is a call to action for low, middle and high-income countries alike. It lays out a set of comprehensive goals that focus on people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership for the next 15 years. It integrates the vision of “leaving no one behind” which can only be accomplished through expanded partnerships for both traditional and nontraditional actors such as Governments, Civil Society, private sector, and the United Nations system. This is at the core of the SDG Fund’s work.

As the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development affirms, new issue areas will play a key role in achieving sustainable development, building and architecture will be critical to improving livelihoods. This was indeed one of the major conclusions from a series of activities organized jointly by the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the SDG Fund last April. This was the very first time that the ceremony of the so-called Nobel Prize of Architecture took place at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

This year’s Pritzker laureate, the Chilean Alejandro Aravena, couldn’t have been a better fit to receive the recognition this year taking into account his commitment to social housing. Through his company Elemental, more than 2,500 low cost social housing units have been built. And one of the objectives of the SDG Fund is indeed to reflect today with all of you how initiatives like these could be scaled up, ensure that no one is left without affordable and sustainable housing.

As the world urbanizes at a rapid pace, extreme poverty is often concentrated in urban spaces, and national and city governments struggle to accommodate the rising population in these areas. Making cities safe and sustainable means ensuring access to safe and affordable housing, and upgrading slum settlements. It also involves investment in public transport, creating green public spaces, and improving urban planning and management in a way that is both participatory and inclusive.

By embracing urbanization at all levels of human settlements, more appropriate policies can embrace urbanization across physical space, bridging urban, peri-urban, and rural areas, and can assist governments in addressing challenges through national and local development policy frameworks.

The challenge of urbanization and the provision of adequate housing for all cannot be solved by any one individual actor alone. Acting on their own, neither individuals nor governments nor civil society nor the private sector will be up to the task. The 2030 Agenda not only recognizes this but actively promotes embracing collaboration, as envisaged in Goal 17, as the only viable solution to the greatest challenges facing humanity today and in the not so distant future.

The dialogues that the SDG Fund organized at the UN headquarters in April this year, recognized the importance of building partnerships with diverse stakeholders to achieve the SDGs.  We will now watch a video that elaborates on the SDG Fund’s work and showcases excerpts from the dialogue which focus on the importance of the architecture industry engaging in UN-led multi-stakeholder sustainable development initiatives to address issues such as building environmental sustainable cities, providing affordable social housing initiatives, minimizing environmental damage and promoting sustainable building techniques. 



  

Opening remarks by Jessica Faieta,UNDG LAC Chair and UNDP Assistant Administrator, at UN Habitat III in Quito, during the side event "Social housing at the core of SDGs" organized by UNHabitat, SDG Fund and UNDP, 19 October 2016.