The poor are the fastest growing segment of urban populations, living mainly in slums and squatter settlements. The Asia/Near East Region (ANE) contains 60% of the world’s slums, which in absolute numbers represents about 550 million slum dwellers. Urban health shows disparities between the urban poor and urban nonpoor for indicators such as child mortality, disease morbidity, and child nutritional status. An analysis of DHS data showed urban poor children may be less healthy than rural children in terms of weight for height (acute malnutrition/wasting). Poor urban slum dwellers tend to suffer more from environmental and infectious illnesses. Death rates for diarrhea, measles and TB among urban poor children can be up to 100 times higher than counterparts in industrialized countries. Poverty, crowded living conditions, outdoor and indoor pollution, and food insecurity are among the factors causing ill health. However, there are numerous advantages to working in urban areas. These include defined geographic zones, people grouped in workplaces, availability of urban services such as water, electricity, trained people and health centers (although they may be unavailable to the urban poor), and urban openness to new ideas. Given the rapid spread of urbanization and urban poverty, there are potential political, social, economic and epidemiological costs to not addressing the needs of the urban poor. This challenge is stated directly in the Millennium Development Goals: “achieve significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.”