Egypt has announced that it will host the 12th World Urban Forum in 2024, during the first session of this year of the Executive Board of the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) in Nairobi, Kenya.
This came in a statement delivered by Ambassador Wael Nasr El-Din, Egypt’s Permanent Representative to the Program, where he confirmed Egypt’s support for the efforts of the Program under the leadership of the current Executive Director, which succeeded in getting it out of its financial insolvency situation.
He stressed the need to provide more support to UNDP regional offices and to increase the number of country offices in developing countries, which were most in need of its mandate.
He also stressed the need to provide more human competencies to UNDP to assist States in submitting their national reports in implementation of the new urban agenda, taking into account the equitable geographical distribution of those elements.
Nasr El-Din tackled the main areas of cooperation between the government and the program, foremost among them working to implement the presidential initiative “A Decent Life”, which aims to improve the lives of about 58% of the Egyptian people living in the countryside and slums at a total cost of more than $35bn.
He said estimates of urban developments in Egypt indicate that 69% of its people will live in cities by 2041. This requires Egypt to adhere to the program’s urban development agenda and work to develop smart solutions to urban challenges in order to achieve a better urban future.
On the other hand, the Permanent Representative of Egypt welcomed the delegations of States to participate in the 12th World Urban Forum, hosted by Cairo in November 2024.
He stressed that Egypt is working to ensure that the conference reflects the priorities of developing countries in the field of urban development in line with the UN goals for sustainable development, in addition to building on the outcomes of the 11th World Urban Forum and the first-of-its-kind ministerial conference held within the framework of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Climate Convention in Sharm El-Sheikh (COP27), which addressed the topics of urban development and climate change.
The World Urban Forum is the world’s largest urban development event, the first of which was launched under the UN Human Settlements Program in 2001 to discuss ways to address the challenges of accelerated urbanization. The Forum is held every two years, with the participation of tens of thousands of representatives of States, the private sector, regional and international financial institutions and civil society.
