1  Introduction

The Millennium Development Goals form an ambitious agenda for reducing poverty and improving lives formulated by world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000. The idea of identifying and setting international development goals for implementation across nations did not start with the MDGs. The UN had been doing it since the first “Development Decade” in the 1960s. However, no comprehensive process and mechanism had been put in place to monitoring progress in achieving these goals at the country level. Instead, the mechanisms of accountability were weak and scattered into different commissions and bodies that do not communicate with each other.

During the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) session on the Integrated Follow-up of Major UN Conferences and Summits held in May 1998, the President of the Council, Ambassador Juan Somavía, reported that

“… in order to effectively monitor progress in the implementation of conferences at the country level, there is an urgent need for the multilateral system to develop a coherent set of basic indicators, as well as the need to strengthen the capacity of the UN system and of countries to collect and analyze statistics.”

During the Millennium Summit held in New York in September 2000, all 189 UN Member States adopted the Millennium Declaration, which contained a core group of goals and targets. The Millennium Declaration updates many of the development goals originally set (and not met) for the year 2000 and reformulates them for the year 2015. It also gives UN endorsement to the goal of “halving extreme poverty,” originally formulated by the OECD,” by the same date.

Housing forms an indispensable part of ensuring human dignity since it is essential for health, privacy and personal space, security and protection from inclement weather, and social space.  In this context, “adequate housing” en­compasses more than just the four walls of a room and a roof over one’s head.  However, population growth, migration to urban areas, conflicting needs for existing land, and insufficient financial and natural resources have resulted in widespread homelessness and habitation in inadequate housing. In every country children, men and women sleep on sidewalks, under bridges, in cars, subway stations, and public parks, live in ghettos and slums, or "squat" in buildings other people have abandoned. The United Nations estimates that there are over 100 million homeless people and over 1 billion people worldwide inadequately housed.

In Ethiopia, these problems are felt broadly and in depth throughout urban centers across the country due to various reasons. One major cause is the irregular pattern of urban growth leading to the emergence of slums’ and homelessness. This is especially true for the situation in Addis Ababa where housing is a serious problem in terms of availability and quality. According to one study,

-        75% of the total population of the city is living in overcrowded houses or dilapidated structures, under unhygienic conditions, lacking basic urban services like safe drinking water and sewage, and in sprawling informal settlements with growing number of shacks.

-        85% of the housing structures in Addis Ababa are dilapidated and would have to be demolished or rehabilitated in a costly manner. They are in their major without the minimum basic infrastructure such as flushing toilets and connection to the sewer system.

-        An estimated 80% of the 150,000 kebele houses have serious problems of maintenance and are in a very bad shape. Up to 50% of the population is without fixed employment.