International workshop Venice - March 11-12 1999 Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management in the Context of Developing Countries
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Han Verschure (PGC-HS, Post Graduate Center Human Settlements, University of Leuven, Heverlee,Belgium)

"The Belgian Development Cooperation and Urban Development"

The Belgian Development Cooperation policy is, as is the case so often for most donor countries, a reflection of national/regional preferences, traditions and cultural linkages as well as of recently renovated aspirations. Two such traditional elements still stand out strongly, i.e. the predominance of rural oriented programmes & projects and the geographical orientation, although not exclusively, towards sub-Sahara Africa.
These two elements can of course be historically explained, but this present-day predominance is more a political choice rather than based upon on a thorough comprehension of a changing developing context.
More specifically one has to state that officially speaking neither human settlements in general, nor urban development in particular are listed in priority sectors. However this does not mean that nothing has been done in these fields.
In the preparation for the Habitat II National Report it has already appeared that under the label of "infrastructure" (which, up to 1995, was identified as a sector in the Belgian Development Cooperation), one could find a total of 7,7 billion BEF (200 million ECU) over the period '86-'94 in infrastructure projects investment by the Belgian Development Cooperation. Such investments covered a variety of projects in e.g. transportation, water supply, energy, environmental protection, housing, telecommunications, spatial planning, refugee projects and capacity building in human settlements.
Since the 1996 new policy orientation, development cooperation policies are grouped around five priority themes: poverty alleviation, security & conflict resolution, health, food security and human resources development (capacity building). Thus the traditional sectoral division has been partially surpassed (although e.g. food security is still largely equated with agricultural projects, and health with medical and emergency aid projects). In principle these themes can be materialized both in a rural or an urban setting, although the predominance of the rural setting has de facto persisted.
However in the specific human settlements field in general and in the urban human settlements development in particular, a series of remarkable programmes and projects have been undertaken by the Belgian Development Cooperation.
Capacity building programmes have been supported e.g. the "Housing in Development" multilateral programme between 1979-1993 organized in cooperation with UNCHS and K.U.Leuven in East Africa and Southeast Asia; the short term training urban development at La Cambre mainly oriented to West African and Latin American countries (since 1985); the regional planning programmes for Indonesian professionals at the WES in Brugge; and several other more limited programmes of training in the field of infrastructure, port development and water management.
Since 1994, a major multilateral programme was set up with UNCHS entitled "Localizing Agenda 21: Planning for Sustainable Urban Development"; this programme is now fully operational in Kenya, Morocco and Vietnam in three major secondary towns and with dissemination in other secondary towns in these countries.
Another major urban project has been developed in Vietnam (bilateral project: Tan Hoa Lo Gom canal sanitation and urban development in HCMC) integrating several development strategies (from waste water treatment and solid waste collection to institution building, job creation, capacity building, community development and urban revitalization.
Besides those, other infrastructure projects have had impacts on urban development (e.g. water projects in Morocco, port development in the Philippines and Vietnam, etc.); some NGO projects also have components related to human settlement development (e.g. Selavip-Chile, Coopibo-Tanzania, Protos-Haiti, etc).