The Fund Co-organized the International Conference on Achieving Sustainable Development Goals
Conference ‘Evidence-based policies to achieve Sustainable Development Goals: sustainable housing and urban development in Ukraine’ took place in NSC Olimpiyskiy, Kiev within Business for Smart Cities Expocongress. The event was organized by UNECE, UNDP, State Fund for Support of Youth Housing Construction and UN-Habitat.
Aim of the event was to strengthen national capacities for crafting evidence-based policy-making for sustainable urban development with a focus on housing.
The event encompassed three objectives:
- to present good practices in production, management and use of data for sustainable urban development policies with a focus on housing;
- to discuss strengths and weakness of various approaches to collection, management and use of data in Ukraine;
- to reflect on opportunities and challenges for better evidence-based policy-making for sustainable urban development with a focus on housing in the country.
The event gathered international audience that included representatives of various UN agencies, independent experts from across Europe, the Ukrainian Government officials, representatives of cities and of academia.
Agata Krause, UNECE and UN-Habitat expert on sustainable urban development, was the event’s moderator.
Gulnara Roll, Head of Housing and Land Management Unit at UNECE and Christophe Lalande, Head of Housing Unit at UN-Habitat dwelled upon the UNDA project on evidence-based policies for sustainable housing and urban development to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Mustafa Sait-Ametov, UNDP Oblast SDGs Portfolio Manager, and Sofia Avdeitchikova, Advisor on Sustainable Development Goals at UNDP Ukraine, as well as the representatives of the Ukrainian Government presented information on activities in Ukraine to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
Agata Krause made a presentation on the ‘UNECE/UN-Habitat guidelines on policies for sustainable urban development with focus on housing’, which focused on the key premises of the guidelines and its structure and featured several examples of approaches to evidence-based policy-making taking into account various data needs in terms of data production, management and use of data.
Session ‘International experiences on opportunities and challenges for better evidence-based policy-making in urban development and housing’ discussed on good practices in crafting evidence-based policies. Robert Hermans, Programme Director at CBS Urban Data Centre (the Netherlands), Doris Andoni, Head of Housing Unit at the Ministry of Finances of Albania and Matteo Tarantino, Lecturer and Senior Research Associate at the University of Geneva outlined selected challenges in production, management and use of data and the ways of addressing them. These included, in particular, a new policy and governance initiatives in terms of digital modernization scheme in Albania, data management centre in the Netherlands and structures for the use of big data in policy.
Ihor Verner, Head of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, Svitlana Startseva, Head of the Housing Policy Department at the Ministry of Regional Development, Construction, Housing and Communal Services of Ukraine, Serhii Komnatnyi, Chairman of the Board of the State Fund for Support of Youth Housing Construction and Vitalii Lukov, Voznesensk City Mayor, took the floor during roundtable ‘Approaches to data collection and management for the development of housing and urban development policies in the context of SDG11 implementation in Ukraine’.
Serhii Komnatnyi dwelled upon the guidelines on preparation and monitoring of housing programmes as of sustainable mechanism of providing the Ukrainian citizens with housing in his speech. Based on the Affordable Housing programme the Fund’s leader showed how the guidelines on preparation and monitoring of housing programmes in Ukraine should look like.
The procedure of preparation of a housing programme includes its proper drafting in the form of a legal text, public discussion, alignment with all central executive authorities and approval by the Government.
The next step is its implementation, in case of Affordable Housing programme – the State Fund for Support of Youth Housing Construction is its implementer through its regional offices.
During the programme implementation, its efficiency analysis is conducted.
The state monitoring of the Affordable Housing programme is carried out by the State Audit Service and the Accounting Chamber of Ukraine. Its main task is to assess the execution of performance indicators, efficiency evaluation, detection of omissions and disadvantages. The main aspect is proportion of two indicators: the amount of provided citizens to the amount of needy citizens. But it’s expedient to make conclusions during the assessment of this proportion only on condition of correlation of actually used financing to the planned one.
Non-state monitoring, in its turn, has to comprise sociological surveys data, public discussion, public reporting and analysis conducted by independent international organizations. The State Fund for Support of Youth Housing Construction has relevant experience of such monitoring. Upon institution’s initiative UNICEF carried out sociological questionnaire of the target audience.
“Evaluation report on the Affordable Housing programme’s implementation prepared by the UNHCR is a new type of monitoring for us as an independent audit conducted by international partners in 2018. It included the state of programme implementation under a number of parameters”, – the Chairman of the Fund’s Board mentioned.
Owing to permanent monitoring of the process of the programme implementation and due to appearance of new categories of socially vulnerable strata of population Affordable Housing programme underwent several stages of updating for 9 years of its existence and turned into residual from the category of universal or targeted programme – in the context of definitions suggested by the European Federation of Social Housing.
Finally, Serhii Komnatnyi reminded that the access to decent and financially affordable housing is a fundamental human need, as well as a human right as declared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the UN General Assembly in 1948.
The leader of the State Fund for Support of Youth Housing Construction concluded by expressing confidence that the elaboration of guidelines on preparation and monitoring of housing programmes as of sustainable mechanism of providing the Ukrainian citizens with housing with due account to definition of the problem, correct establishment of mechanisms of its implementation and efficient procession of collected data will make us closer to achieving Goal 11 of SDGs – “Sustainable development of cities and communities.”