The health and rights of populations living in informal or slum settlements are key development issues of the twenty-first century. As of 2007, the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. More than one billion of these people, or one in three city-dwellers, live in inadequate housing with no or a few basic resources. In Bangladesh, urban slum settlements tend to be located in l...

Obtaining up-to-date spatial information about slum settlements is of great importance for decision making related to slum and housing policy. The availability of Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery in meter or sub-meter level is helpful and promising in the information extraction of slum areas based on object-oriented techniques. This paper aims to determine the feasibility of using V...

Housing, food, and water are considered to be basic requirements for daily living. Unfortunately, inadequate housing with poor water supply, sanitation, and ventilation threatens the lives and health of some 600 million urban dwellers worldwide (see, among others, Cebu Study Team 1991; S. A. Esrey et al. 1991; Galiani, Gertler, and Ernesto Schargrodsky 2005; and World Bank 2005). For this reaso...

We show that ethnic patronage and weak property rights provide an avenue for rent extraction in a Kenyan slum, Kibera. Slum residents pay higher rents for their dwelling, and invest less in housing quality when the landlord and the local chief belong to the same tribe. Conversely, rents are lower, and investments higher, when the household and the chief belong to the same tribe. These effects a...

Slums are home to a large fraction of urban residents in cities of developing nations, but little attempt has been made to go beyond a simple slum/non-slum dichotomy, nor to identify slums more quantitatively than through local reputation. We use census data from Accra, Ghana, to create an index that applies the UN-Habitat criteria for a place to be a slum. We use this index to identify neighbo...

BACKGROUND Urbanization is occurring at a rapid pace, especially in low-income countries. Dhaka, Bangladesh, is estimated to grow to 50 million by 2015, with 21 million living in urban slums. Although health services are available, neonatal mortality is higher in slum areas than in urban non-slum areas. The Manoshi program works to improve maternal, newborn, and child health in urban slums in B...

Rapid urbanisation and quest for better livelihood, push-pull factor of occupations education, policy changes attract large scale rural population to urban areas. It is well documented that in spite of better public health facilities including tertiary care hospitals which are available in the urban areas but the services are underutilised by the urban poor. Aim: Hence, in this paper, it is att...

BACKGROUND In Bangladesh, similar to its other South Asian counterparts, shortage of health workers along with inadequate infrastructure constitute some of the major obstacles for the equitable provision of reproductive healthcare services, particularly among the marginalized and underserved neighbourhoods. However, given the rapidly expanding broadband communication and mobile phone market in ...