Poverty Alleviation: Challenges To The African Development Planners, Discovery And Innovation

Abstract

The United Nation's millennium declaration of September 2000 emphasized the need to free all fellow men, women and children from the abject poverty to which an estimated human population in excess of one billion is said to be subjected to. It was therefore found necessary to work towards the identification and design of the right development parameters that would free the entire human race from want. In Africa the instruments of urban planning, like the planning personnel who use them, have had foreign orientation and influence. The institutional frameworks under which urban planning takes place in Africa have tended to have excessive government influence. Consequently, political ideals rather than planning visions have tended to be propagated. Prospects, however, exist for a re-orientation towards more substainable urban development, and management: what with the clamour for democratization in Africa which commenced in the 1990s. Prospects of poverty alleviation through sustainable planning processes exist and will depend on the careful stimulation and revitalization of the urban centres in Africa. The resources for the stimulation of urban areas just like the innovations required for the stimulation must come from Africa: if growth and development in the region have to be sustained or be sustainable