- Follow Us!
Close to 70 million people per year migrate from the countryside to the cities. That’s 1.5 million people per week or 130 people every minute. In fact, the world population is expected to swell from 6 billion today to 8 billion by 2030, with 95 percent of that growth taking place in the poorest regions of the world, and overwhelmingly in poor cities like Karachi, Cairo, and Manila. Already there are 1 billion persons—one out of every six—living in squatter communities. By 2030 that figure will mushroom to 2 billion squatters—one out of every four people on the planet. This explosive growth of slums is perhaps the crucial demographic and geopolitical event of our times.
Most of this global social class of perhaps one billion ex-peasants, civil servants, informal wage earners, and mini-entrepreneurs improvise lives largely disconnected from the world economy. Their living conditions are almost unthinkable. Overcrowding, squalor, unemployment, chronic health hazards, hopelessness, and violence are everyday realities.
At the same time, out of the slums of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa has emerged Pentecostal Christianity—a dynamic religious form that mixes spectacles-oriented fundamentalism with slum-based social services. This is now the largest self-organized movement of poor urban people in the world. Will it ultimately transcend its reactionary elements in order to serve as a vibrant, faith-based vanguard for social and spiritual redemption?
Part of the answer to this question hinges on enlightened leadership at both community and regional levels. Urban poor communities desperately need intelligent, ethical leaders who are able to organize residents around initiatives that instill hope, mend families, create jobs, foster educational opportunities, improve sanitation and health care, and promote sound planning policies.
The Master of Arts in Transformational Urban Leadership (MATUL) Program aims to prepare such leaders. Entrepreneurial training institutions on four continents (Asia, Africa, North America, and South America) sponsor this entirely field-based program, with a single focus: to develop leaders who can catalyze transformational movements for positive change within the world’s burgeoning slums and shantytowns.