 My name is Kasaija Peter and I am currently a PhD student at Macario University under the Geography Department. I'm also working with an initiative that was started under the Geography Department for the Urban Action Lab, where we are focusing more on issues to do with climate change, adaptation, disaster and risk reduction, heterogeneous urban infrastructure, urban ecology, as well as issues related to other issues related to climate change. I have extensive research experience, especially on issues to do with informality and urban poverty. Right now I'm actually engaged in a project with Diana Midland from IIED. It's basically a project that's trying to understand, examine, analyze and understand how civil society organizations are influencing the way government is shaping urban development vision, its capacity and commitment to realizing proper development, especially in the urban sector. Looking at the context of this particular conference and what we are seeing coming out of the conference, the focus on housing and urban development, I think it's timely, the realization that we are seeing more and more communities living in urban centers, in cities and towns. And one of the biggest challenges we are facing with that is coming with urbanization is informality or urban poverty. The majority of communities or people living in these cities are actually poor. They do not have access to opportunities. They do not have access to infrastructure, social infrastructure. And given the research experience I have, this focus that is shifting to urban development and housing, I think has come at a very important time, especially the threshold where we are looking at more and more people living in cities. It is commendable that this focus has now shifted to the urban development sphere or the urban development sector, especially housing because it's one of the biggest challenges we are facing. How do we house all these people that we are seeing moving into the cities and the towns, into the urban areas? But ultimately where will actually require the impact of agreements that are arising from events such as this, is the real commitment itself by the different stakeholders, especially governments, to following through to what they actually agreed to follow, to following through on the actions they agreed upon here. Because it is one thing to ratify all these documents, but it's completely a different thing to actually follow through with the commitment because in Africa for a long time governments have not really put that much emphasis or focus on housing. It's been completely left to the private sector. With the recognition that housing is important, it's a critical aspect of urban development. Hopefully we will see a little more pressure being placed on these governments and other stakeholders to invest more resources, give more attention by devising the necessary legal frameworks, institutional frameworks, structural frameworks to actually make an impact on the majority of communities that we are seeing living or moving to the cities today.