State/City Consultations on Strengthening Civil Society Voices on Urban Poverty

PRIA and SPARC along with a number of partner civil society and community-based organizations are working towards strengthening civil society voices and actions on ever increasing issues in urban poverty in different states of the country.

One of the major inadequacies in taking forward the agenda of inclusion and active participation of the urban poor in various government run programmes is weak civil society engagement with issues of urban poverty and urban governance. There are just a handful of civil society organizations in the country which have focused on organizing and mobilizing the urban poor to claim their rights and thereby to secure active participation and ownership of urban development programmes. There is no national network of civil society, or even a sub-sectoral coalition, that focuses on these issues on a sustained basis. Strong civil society engagement would be crucial at city level and state government level; only then can engagement at the national level be valuable to ensure supportive policies and guidelines from the central government and other agencies like the Planning Commission.

With the aim to strengthen civil society participation, PRIA is organizing state and city level consultations on 26 May in Kollam. The consultation will share collective experiences. The objective of this consultation is to evolve a collective understanding through dialogues on methods and approaches to address the issues of urban poverty in the state. This consultation would also strive to sensitize and educate different sections of society about the need to strategically and collectively focus on issues of urban poor to ensure supportive strategies and tactics for enhancing community participation and ascertaining people’s participation by empowering stakeholders with knowledge about various government run programmes and schemes. Participants from community, civil society, academia, media and government are expected to attend the consultations.