Africa-Press – Lesotho. The acting Director of Housing in the Ministry of Local Government, Chieftainship, Home Affairs and Police, Ms. Mamphaka Mabesa says Lesotho needs a transformative change in cities and human settlements for a more sustainable, inclusive, resilient, and safer urban future, where no one and no place is left behind.
She said this when officially opening the workshop on the Adoption of the Global Urban Monitoring Framework for Monitoring and Measuring the Performance of Agenda 2030- SDGs and New Urban Agenda. Ms.
Mabesa noted that to achieve the SDGs and leave no one behind, Lesotho needs to accelerate its actions, saying together we can turn commitments into action by following the UN Habitat 2 Assembly resolutions and the recently launched UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework 2024 – 2028 (UNSDCF ) by the United Nations and the Prime Minister, Mr.
Ntsokoane Samuel Matekane last week. She stressed that they are responding to the call and taking this opportunity to join in the ‘Lebelo la Ntšoekhe’ (loosely translated to Ntšoekhe’s Marathon) and strengthen their commitment to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs through the development of the Maseru City UMF Report and implementation of Habitat Assembly 2 resolutions.
Ms. Mabesa said the UN maintains that cities are where the battle is for sustainable development will be won or lost, saying Maseru city and its subsidiary towns face a complex combination of challenges, deep environmental challenges, climate change, increasing socio-economic challenges, inequalities, unemployment and urban poverty.
She added that UMF is a guide for urban monitoring of SDGs and NUA and other urban-related policies and frameworks such as the National Housing Policy, saying the data was collected in August 2022 and validated in October 2022.
She stressed that through this report, Maseru city can track and report on its progress, noting that the report is based on the matrix of five domains of the global UMF thus; society, culture, environment, economy, governance and implementation and the four city objectives that include safe and peaceful, resilience and sustainable.
Also speaking, the Housing Officer, Mrs. Mamorapeli Bookholane said UMF is a uniform global tool used by all countries to monitor the progress of localization and implementation of SDG and NUA.
She noted that UMF is used to improve the capacity of local authorities to collect and produce city data even for the next step of voluntary local review and the flexibility of the framework to localize some of the indicators to suit the country’s situation. Mrs.
Bookholane said UMF is aimed at the identification and mapping of ministries and Institutions as key stakeholders, identification of existing and missing urban policies, sensitization of stakeholders on SDGs indicators and NUA domains, data collection using SDGs indicators and NUA domains as well as UMF report formulation.
UN-Habitat data and Analytics Section Knowledge and Innovation, Ms. Wandia Riunga when speaking of the environment domain key said Maseru city faces challenges but excels in many areas in the environmental challenges are not well documented due to the absence of data at the city level.
She noted that going forward, Lesotho needs integration of the inter-sectoral interventions, local urban observatory and urban data to support the formulation of evidence-based policies, establish permanent mechanisms for monitoring urban indicators – SDGs, NUA, national indicators, local indicators, and also promote the use of urban data in planning and policy-making at the local and national level as well as to disseminate information to strengthen transparency.
The UN Habitat has assisted Lesotho in data collection and monitoring progress toward achieving SDG 11 targets. This helps in identifying gaps and challenges and enables evidence-based decision-making. The UMF report is expected to be launched before the end of September.
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