IBSA is a trilateral agreement (2003) between India, Brazil and South Africa to promote South-South Cooperation and exchange on several mutually agreed areas of interest.
At the Fourth Meeting of the Trilateral Commission of the IBSA Dialogue Forum held in Delhi in July 2007, Human Settlement Development was identified as an area of cooperation for IBSA partners. And in 2008, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed in Delhi. The MoU serves as the formal platform for trilateral engagement amongst the three countries.
The specific areas for collaboration within the domain of Human settlement Development are Policy dialogues, Technical cooperation, and Joint research.
In Quito, during Habitat 3, IHS was asked by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation in India (MoHUPA) to organize a meeting cum seminar: ‘Taking forward Urban Housing and Habitat Policy for Sustainable Development – Experiences from IBSA Partners’
Invited to the seminar were: Senior officials and professionals working at different levels of Government (National, State and Local); Representatives from national field agencies implementing Human Settlement related programmes; Scholars/Resource persons associated with academic / research institutions, including representatives from current and potential anchor institution; Development partners (UN Habitat, IHS, Cities Alliance, GIZ); (Inter) national NGOs working in the field of human settlements.
The programme of the meeting in Quito followed an agreement made in Surabaya, Indonesia during the third Prepcom meeting. In the seminar experiences on current and proposed policy initiatives in the field of human settlements in the respective IBSA countries were presented.
Also a tri-partite discussion was held between the three government delegations about the way forward with the IBSA-HS collaboration. It was decided that IHS was going to be the new knowledge partner for IBSA-HS. A first initiative under the strengthened collaboration that was agreed upon was that a conference is going to be organized in February 2017. Topic and location will be discussed further.