Countries that have been invited to the meeting include the Governments of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, United States of America, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The European Commission and World Bank are also expected to attend.

With almost a billion people, or half the developing world’s urban population, living in slums, the need for action has never been greater. It is for this reason that the overriding theme for this meeting will be Sustainable Urbanization and how the international community should be responding to the rapidly growing urbanization of poverty in the world and the role of UN-HABITAT in this effort.

An important aspect of the meeting is to discuss and gain agreement on how best development partners and UN-HABITAT together can advance the issues and ideas encapsulated in the UN-HABITAT’s Medium Term Strategic and Institutional Plan for the 2008-13. This strategy prioritizes key areas and initiatives that need to be undertaken in a focused way to achieve sustainable urbanization.

The meeting will also be used to define and agree on a more regular and comprehensive donor consultation process in line with the recommendations of the Paris Declaration and UN reform process on system-wide coherence.