Thursday, August 18, 2011 – According to a research by Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), an increasingly growing urbanisation has boosted unemployment rate and caused disorder in cities in Afghanistan.
The research further adds, cities have been hit by a wave of rural and semi-rural settlers that could increase unemployment rate and mess up the lives of city dwellers.
The research also states, construction of houses and apartments without the plans of municipality and an increase in urbanization have caused serious challenges for the municipal governments.
According to the research, besides creating problems for the municipality to provide services to its citizens, the rapid increase of population in the main cities also causes other major issues like lack of employment and construction of houses and apartments against the government plans.
Jay Lamey, a Senior Publications Officer at the AREU said, “The major issue of course is providing services to these people and the municipal governments need to be set up in a way that enables them to serve everybody.”
Jay Lamey further added, “Now at the moment local governments, I mean city governments, are not able to get any tax from people who live in these informal settlements. So it’s difficult for them to raise the necessary money to serve them. And there is also some existing government system, such as the master planning system and the system of converting land from rural to urban.”
He also said, “They are very difficult and to them it makes it difficult for cities to expand in a legal way and therefore they end up with issues like land grabbing and informal settlement.”
The research was conducted on three main cities of the country and states, unstable situation and specifically lack of employment paves the way for the rural people to leave their villages and start living in the cities which pursue them to stop agriculture, the profession of their predecessors.
