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Over the past decade, housing policy in developing countries has witnessed an important shift. After decades of limited and in some cases decreasing investments in housing, there has been a sudden, extraordinarily large, and simultaneous expansion of multi-billion-dollar housing programmes. These new investments reveal a radical policy change, one that signals the serious and welcomed effort of tackling the looming affordability concerns that have been plaguing cities across the world. Yet this paper raises concerns over the direction of current housing policies and programmes. It argues that the new emphasis on addressing the problem through the production of industrial-scale new housing on the outskirts of cities, or through the development of new cities requiring extraordinarily expensive infrastructure, does not necessarily address the affordability concerns. For this reason, the paper raises a series of questions and offers recommendations that address some of the most important elements of decision-making that should be taken into account when planning affordable housing. These are meant to help identify why housing challenges arise, in order to avoid Thomas Pynchon's well-known aphorism: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

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Urbanization is happening differently today than in the past and occurring most rapidly in places with the fewest resources. Traditional approaches are not able to keep up, leaving billions of people with poor access to basic necessities, dragging down economies and damaging the environment. This synthesis report of the Towards a More Equal City series proposes a new way of thinking about urban development, where the metrics for a functional and thriving city are defined by the quality, reliability and affordability of essential services. The report brings together the best thinking from over six years of research and more than 160 authors and reviewers. It acts as a roadmap for how to break through sectoral silos and the status quo to make cities more equal, which will in turn create prosperity, reduce environmental damage and improve livelihoods. The report documents breakthrough innovations from numerous cities, revealing real solutions and the outcomes of investing in equitable service provision. It also offers a clear path to recovery now and resilience in the future. Human development challenges are increasingly urban development challenges, including the ways in which they relate to climate change. These findings can help cities, countries and the global community make progress on critical global objectives, from the Sustainable Development Goals and UN Habitat’s New Urban Agenda to the Paris Agreement and COVID-19 recovery.

Sanitation delivery in the urban areas of sub-Saharan African countries has been a chronic issue, particularly difficult to tackle. Under the Millennium Development Goals, the sanitation target in urban sub-Saharan Africa was missed by a wide margin and witnessed almost no improvement. After 2 years of review, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme published a new measure of access to sanitation as a baseline for the Sustainable Development Goals. There are a number of improvements in the new measure. However, despite the improvements, the new measure continues to be characterized by an important flaw: it continues to disregard how shared toilet facilities contribute towards the SDG sanitation target. As a result, the new measure does not indicate whether progress is being made in low-income urban areas where a large number of households rely on shared sanitation; nor does it provide a goal that can be achieved in cities of the poorest countries over the measurement period. But, its most egregious failing is that it directs resources towards investments which will often fail cost/benefit tests. In sum, it is not a surprise that a Working Group recommended that the measure should be changed to include some shared facilities. Following the Working Group's recommendation would have avoided the adverse consequences of continued reliance on a key component of the methodology used for monitoring sanitation improvements under the Millennium Development Goals. The paper discusses the limitations of this methodology in the context of urban sub-Saharan Africa, where current sanitation conditions are seriously lacking, and the significant future urban population growth will add more pressure for the delivery of vital sanitation services.