Project Document >> Project Justification


Problem to be addressed; the present situation

Measuring Human Well-being

'The real wealth of a nation is its people - both women and man. And the purpose of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and creative lives. This simple but powerful truth is too often forgotten in the pursuit of material and financial wealth'.

'Human Development is a process of enlarging people's choices. In principle, these choices can be infinitive and can change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones are for people to lead a long a healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living. If these essential choices are not available, many of the other opportunities remain inaccessible.

But Human Development does not end there. Additional choices, highly valued by many people, range form political, economic and social freedom to opportunities for being creative and productive and enjoying personal self-respect and safety. Human development thus has two sides. One is the formation of human capabilities - such as improved health, knowledge and skills. The other is the use people make of their acquired capabilities - for productive purposes, for leisure or for being active in cultural, social and political affairs. If the scales of human development do not finely balance the two sides, much human frustration can result.'

Working towards the improvement of Human Development is considered here equal to improvement of the 'quality of life' including 'urban quality of life'. It all boils down to the improvement of human well being.

Measuring ' urban quality of life' can not be measured in absolute sense but in only in relative sense for example in relation to a point in time in the past. By comparing the current 'quality of life' with that of a fixed point in time, trends (upwards as well as down wards) can be identified.

Measuring the progress, or lack of it, towards the goal of improvement is not an easy thing to do since the required tools are not very well developed yet.

Economic growth models for example, deal with expanding GNP rather than enhancing the quality of lives. Related monetary measurements for goods and services, as exemplified by per capita GNP, are similarly efficient measurements for monetary welfare only, but are highly inadequate for measuring the social side of development in particular for measuring well-being in its wide variety of facets including its social and cultural side. Such measurements also tend to exclude natural and social amenities derived from the place of residence.

To be able to pass judgment on the direction of the development towards this goal and on the expected and achieved effects of polices, there is an urgent need for a tool that will be able to measure a cross section of the aspects that comprise ''quality of life''. It is believed that indices which incorporate a cross-sectoral approach, can be usefully in this.

By virtue of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people in Bahrain is living in urbanized areas, the urban environment in its broadest sense is shaping the well being of its population and of Bahrain as a nation in a major way. Policy decision and the way how these policy decision are arrived at therefore play an extremely important role in contributing to the urban quality of life (absolute and perceived). To be able to arrive at policy decisions that contribute to this, an appropriate mechanism of participatory development planning and implementation is required.

A crisis of information

For the first time in history, rapid growth of population and its concentration in cities around the world are affecting the long-term outlook for humanity. Despite four millennia as centers of civilization and economic activity, cities never attracted more than five percent of the global population until the last 150 years. Now, at the end of the 20th century, systems of cities have become the world's social, economic, cultural and political matrix. Bahrain is not an exception in this.

Due to the relative early discovery of oil in Bahrain, the country's level of urbanization has, for long, been one of the highest in the world. In the 1940's already around 70% of the 90.000 people lived in urban areas. In the early 1990's the population has grown to a total of approximately 509.000 of which the major share 450.000 was classified as urban. This means that around 90% of the population is urban. The steady increase in population, expected to have reached over 700.000 people by the year 2000 and reaching around 1.8 million in the year 2041 , combined with at least a stable rate of urbanization, but possible a further slight increasement, will further reinforce 'urban' as the most dominant sector.

Confronted by globalization and increasing complexity of society, the urbanized areas in Bahrain as in the rest of the world, are increasingly faced by ever changing developments.

For better or for worse, the development of contemporary societies and related to it the 'quality of life' of the individuals comprising these societies, including Bahrain's, will depend largely on understanding and managing the growth of cities. The city will increasingly become the test bed for the adequacy of political institutions, for the performance of government agencies, and for the effectiveness of programmes to combat social exclusion, to repair the environment and to promote economic development.

Most cities in the world in both the developed and developing countries (including in Bahrain) are suffering from an information crisis that is seriously undermining their capacity to develop and analyze effective urban policy. They have neither a sustained nor systematic appraisal of urban problems (both physical as well as social) and little appreciation of what their own remedial policies and programs are in fact achieving. Existing tools for urban policy in both developing and developed countries have been largely inadequate in providing an overall picture of the city and how it works. Rarely do they provide the means for understanding the relationship between policy and urban outcomes, nor do they provide an indication of the relationships between the performance of individual sectors and broader social and economic development results.

In determining the causes of urban dysfunction and in monitoring progress toward achieving sustainable cities, which provide for possibilities of Human Development and a high level of 'quality of life', it is increasingly necessary to rely on effective tools to analyze the performance of cities. It is also necessary to have accurate and timely information on key policy variables and performance indicators which measure urban conditions and changes, physical as well as social.

"In sustainable development, everyone is a user and provider of information considered in the broad sense. That includes data, information, appropriately packaged experience and knowledge. The need for information arises at all levels, from that of senior decision makers at national and international levels to grass-roots and individual levels."

"The gap in the availability, quality, coherence, standardization and accessibility of data between the developed and the developing world has been increasing, seriously impairing the capacity of countries to make informed decisions concerning environment and development."

"There is a general lack of capacity . . . for the collection and assessment of data, for their transformation into useful information and for their dissemination." "Indicators of sustainable development need to be developed to provide solid bases for decision-making at all levels and to contribute to a self-regulating sustainability of integrated environment and development systems."

Agenda 21 , Rio 1992

A serious problem for urban policy makers in both developed and developing countries (including Bahrain) has been the lack of appropriate information. Most major economic aggregates that might measure the health of the urban economy, such as city product, investment or trade, are not available. Other data, which might describe the condition of the population, infrastructure and the environment, are available in some places but not in other and are seldom collected in a consistent framework. Data that measure the internal spatial structure of the city, its economy and the distribution of opportunities are not collected in many parts of the world, including Bahrain.

Almost everyone (within Bahrain and abroad alike) is aware of the necessity for data in policy making, to provide objective measures of conditions and trends, to avoid or to correct mistakes, and to rethink ineffective policy. The problem is that, while enormous amounts of data are being generated at very high costs, they are understood very poorly and are often inappropriate, inaccurate, incomplete or not generated for specific policy purposes.


There is a need to build national, and sub-national capacity to collect useful information on urban (physical, economical and social) conditions and trends, to convert that information to knowledge through appropriate analytic techniques, and to apply that knowledge in formulating and modifying urban policies and programmes in a participatory fashion.

This was realized by the world during the United Nations Conference for Human Settlements (Habitat II). This acknowledgment that these principles are important was further strengthened at the 'Regional meeting for the follow-up of United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat): Implementation of the Habitat Agenda in the Arab region. At this regional meeting the participants acknowledged the need for serious, continues work toward the implementation of the principals and commitments stated in the Habitat Agenda. Furthermore the participants at this meeting recommended that a well established data base is the ground for development, it depends on urban research, local institutions, and advanced learning methods for its sustainability (fifth recommendation) and the credibility and accessibility of urban information is one of the important requisites for urban development, This emphasize the necessity of efficient and modern information provision methods.


It is the gap between policymaking and data that the Bahrain Urban Indicators Programme, or 'BUIP' as it is also called, tries to address (see also figure 1).

Figure 1: Link between Data and Policy making.

Indicators must be considered as tools to communicate information to decision-makers. Information that is offered in its raw form is normally difficult to judge and to act upon. Indicators however, provide a simpler form of information than complex statistical data.

Indicators quantify information, so its significance is more readily apparent and also simplify information about complex phenomena, so as to improve communication. Indicators are distinct from statistics, and primary data, even though they are often presented in statistical or graphical form. Indicators are a component of what is known as the 'information pyramid' whose base is primary data and basic monitoring data (see figure 2).

Basic data are required by scientists and experts. Politicians and policy-makers require aggregated data as a tool for decision-making. The general public, on the other hand, requires information often of a simpler kind, arising form further aggregation. An index, a highly aggregated form of indicators of relevance for planners and the general public, further condenses data into useful information and is situated on the apex of the information pyramid.

Figure 2: The Information Pyramid.

The need to address this gap between policy making and data is made even more urgent by national commitments to monitor progress in attaining the numerous objectives of the Habitat Agenda.

THE HABITAT AGENDA

"...we commit ourselves to implementing the Habitat Agenda, through local, national, subregional and regional plans of action and/or other policies and programmes drafted and executed in cooperation with interested parties at all levels and supported by the international community ...." [37]

"All partners of the Habitat Agenda, including local authorities, the private sector and communities, should regularly monitor and evaluate their own performances in the implementation of the Habitat Agenda through comparable human settlements and shelter indicators and documented best practices ...." [240]

"Such [indicators and best practices] information, which should be available and accessible to all, will be provided to the United Nations, taking into account the ... need for reporting procedures to reflect diversity in regional, national, subnational and, in particular, local characteristics and priorities." [241]

The Habitat Agenda
Istanbul 1996


The value of an indicators system is highly depending on the usefulness of the indicators for the tasks the different stakeholders (at central and local level) have at hand. If the indicators are developed in consultation and cooperation with the future users, it can be assured that the indicators will give answers to the most pressing questions of these users.

The Bahrain Urban Indicators Programme is not to be an isolated exercise. It is closely linked with the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) Indicators Programme.

The Urban Indicators Programme (UIP) is a decentralized networking and capacity-building programme that responds to one of the most critical needs of urban policy - the need for better information on urban conditions and trends. The Urban Indicators Programme and Best Practice and Local Leadership Programme (BLP), together, make up the Global Urban Observatory, a UNCHS (Habitat)'s facility for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21.

The programme started in 1988 as the Housing/Urban Indicator Programme, a joint Habitat/World Bank initiative, in response to the objectives of the Global Strategy for Shelter to the Year 2000. The programme collected policy-sensitive housing indicators in principal cities of 53 countries during 1991-1992.

The Programme provided the impetus to develop a set of urban indicators designed to capture essential information on cities and to monitor the performance of the urban domain in relation to desired policy goals.

In 1993, the programme moved towards the broader issue of Sustainable Urban Development, responding to a major theme chosen for the 1996 Habitat II Conference: 'Sustainable Human Settlements in an Urbanizing World. Following a meeting of experts in Nairobi in January 1994, an extensive set of urban indicators was selected covering, in addition to housing, a wide variety of urban policy issues. These indicators were endorsed in April 1994 at the first substantive session of the Preparatory Committee for the Habitat II Conference.

These indicators formed an integral part of the preparatory process for Habitat II. A list of 46 key indicators was endorsed as the minimum set of indicators to be collected by each country in preparation for the conference. By the time of the conference, data on key indicators had been received from 221 cities in 104 countries.

The first phase of the global Urban indicators Programme revealed a double demand on the programme. On the one hand, the UIP was conceived a global means to collect indicators data that will allow comparison to be made between cities, between countries and between regions. On the other hands, national and local participants expressed the need for indicators data that reflect their particular circumstances. Reconciliation of global and local expectations is made possible in two ways: firstly the adoption of a set of universal key indicators and a set of indicators developed locally, and secondly the establishment of a global network of local and national urban indicators Programmes which supports a more refined global analysis over time.

Keeping this in mind the UIP works towards 1) the development of networks for information exchange and capacity building, 2) the development of policy-oriented urban indicators and indices, 3) development of tools for collection an analysis of indicators data 4) the analyzes and dissemination of global indicators data.