Poverty in the countryside makes people flock to urban areas. The glitz, glamour, and bright lights of the city attract poor people to urban destinations as if they were the guiding star. Millions of people flock to cities every week. In developing nations, populations are expected to triple over the next 30 years. Most of these will naturally want to seek what they think is a better life in urban areas. When people land and settle in the city, they just as soon find out that the urban arena is a much more wretched place for them. Since they took the one-way ticket to the promised land, they have lost all chances to go back to where they came from.
Their settlements in urban areas quickly turn into slums – a graphic representation of sub-human living standards, squalor, and social malaise. Because slums do not have the usual conveniences of humanized living, these places suffer from water and sanitation crisis which, in turn, breeds disease, morbidity, and mortality. It has been estimated that 5,000 children die everyday across the globe due to waterborne diseases caused by poor sanitation and unclean water. A good percentage of these cases are found in urban slums. Nearly a billion people do not have access to potable drinking water. Roughly 2.5 billion live in places with poor sanitation.
The United Nations states that more than half of the world’s population have settled in urban areas, most of them in cities of developing countries. Africa is a glaring case in point. The influx of people to cities in this continent has been unbridled and uncontrollable. Urban development is nil without sanitation and water systems. It is no small wonder that the top killer infectious diseases in the world are found to be devastating the most people in Africa.
Via BBC
