Because I am a Girl: Urban and Digital Frontiers - Plan International

Justice for girls
There is little recognition at any level by
those who run our cities that adolescent
girls have different requirements and
different vulnerabilities than boys, older
women and younger girls. We will show
how, in order to keep safe, they need secure
transport, adequate lighting, and affordable
and decent housing. To mature into
responsible adults, they require education
and health services targeted at their needs
and, when they are the right age, the
possibility of decent work.
With cities mostly built, planned
and run by men, the requirements of
women and girls are often ignored – and
those of adolescent girls particularly so.
Adolescent girls have huge energy, ideas
and enthusiasm, as some of the projects we
will showcase reveal. But, as UN-Habitat
points out: “Young women and girls have
traditionally had little say in how cities are
developed, how services are delivered, and
how governance structures are run.” 18 Giving
them a say will not just make cities safe for
girls: they will make them better places to
live for everyone.
The issues about adolescent girls in cities
that this report raises are not going to go
away; on the contrary, they will become
more urgent with each passing day. By the
middle of the 21st century the majority of
countries in the developing world will be
mostly urban. 19 The issues must therefore be
addressed with the speed that they deserve.
We owe this, and much more, to the millions
of adolescent girls who live in cities and the
many more who will live there in the coming
decades. The United Nations notes that:
“The future of cities depends on the future
of young people. In particular, it depends on
what policymakers can do to equip young
people to break the cycle of poverty. This in
turn depends on involving young people in
the decisions that affect them.” 20
Adolescent girls in slums
“Both men and women in slums face
problems associated with poverty, poor
living conditions and lack of social safety
nets. But research shows that women and
girls are by far the worst affected.”
Anna Tibaijuka, Executive Director
of UN-Habitat 21
Manoocher Deghati / IRIN
According to UN-Habitat, a ‘slum household’
is a group of individuals living under the
same roof in an urban area who lack one
or more of the following: durable housing,
sufficient living area, access to safe water,
access to sanitation and secure tenure. Not
all poor people live in slums, and not all
people who live in areas defined as slums are
poor. However, slum dwellers constitute the
majority of the world’s urban poor. 22
Slum dwellers are no longer a few
thousand in a few cities of a rapidly
industrialising continent. Vast urban slums
are now the reality of daily life for around
828 million people: one out of every three
city dwellers, almost a sixth of the world’s
population. 23 The majority of slum dwellers
live in Asia, and more than 70 per cent
of Africa’s urban population live in areas
that can be defined as slums, 24 although
aggregate statistics hide deep inequalities
and gloss over concentrations of harsh
poverty within cities. 25 The pace and scale of
slum growth is changing rapidly. There are
now more than 250,000 – Delhi now has
‘slums within slums’ and in Cairo and Phnom
Penh urban squatters on rooftops have built
slum cities in the air. 26
Slums are also vibrant places: “Slums
are filled with entrepreneurs,” as Judith
Hermanson of InterAction points out: 27
“Slums are creative places, full of people
who have made a living in very difficult
circumstances.”
However, the majority of the world’s
slum dwellers are likely to die younger,
Living in a
Bangladeshi
slum.
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