Samuel Tedla

I have over fifteen years of built up relevant professional experiences with rich academic credentials in Architecture, human settlement and Urban Planning ranging from local to city level development plan preparation and supervision of implementation projects. During my careers I had the opportunity to live, work and study in different human settlement situations in East African cities in Ethiopia mainly Addis Ababa as well as post conflict area in the Republic of South Sudan and in a Mega citiy like Delhi, India. This wisdom helps me to understand the general ecology of human settlement in regards to the challenges of integrated urban development schemes, the effort of habitat demonstration projects in addressing conflict resolutions and the complex infrastructural arrangement cities are demanding nowadays correspondingly. Working as an Architect Urban Planner in the Addis Ababa city administration as the majority of my professional career, I have started with the Office for the Revision of Addis Ababa Master Plan (ORAAMP) in 2002 and future participated and coordinated different Local Development Plan preparations that extends from inner city slum integration efforts to new urban settlement planning schemes as a tool to implement the revised Master plan. In addition I also managed to prepare with a team the national standard on cooperative housing neighborhood planning and design manual especially to address an integrated human settlement planning efforts to include Ethiopian city slums. My latest volunteer as Urban Management Specialist in UNDP South Sudan after my postgraduate study in India made me involve fully in a habitat demonstration project in order to reintegrate internally displaced people (IDP) in one of the state’s capital. During my stay, I have managed to integrate other UN agencies and international non-government organizations efforts in the resettlement planning and implementation of the selected habitat demonstration project. The major themes that I was dealing with are local development planning with Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene issues in an illegally occupied and unplanned neighborhood setting. Professionally I am of the opinion that as much as spending resources on infrastructure for the provision of new WASH facilities to the community in need, it is high time that such efforts need an integrated participatory data collection, survey and agglomeration of all important information in different layers among all actors in the sector in order to build a substantial knowledge center to make decisions on alternative approaches in order to create common understanding of needs to prioritize humanitarian interventions.