A/HRC/22/61 the social protection of a family, the elderly poor are a particularly marginalized and vulnerable group.101 47. Groups that are victims of additional stigma or marginalization, such as ethnic or religious minorities, migrants, non-citizens and disadvantaged castes, are also vulnerable to the hazards of urban poverty. Combined with constrained access to education, employment and health care, as well as limited or discriminatory legal policies for foreign migrants and refugees, the marginalization due to their minority status can make survival strategies for these groups much more complex.102 48. In post-conflict and post-disaster situations, poor urban communities are particularly vulnerable on three fronts. First, communities of urban poor form in marginalized areas that often are more vulnerable to disaster and without adequate planning and infrastructure to decrease their vulnerability to events such as flood, earthquakes, fires and storms. Second, very few services are available for poor urban communities to strengthen their resilience to such shocks.103 Safety nets typically available to higher-income families, such as insurance or savings, are not usually available much of the urban poor. Third, even when recovery efforts are under way, resources and attention are frequently focused on other parts of the city and diverted from the communities that may need them the most. 104 V. Good practices 49. Many efforts have made to further the rights of the urban poor, but they often have mixed results. Food aid, for example, was criticized for its high shipping, storage and distribution costs. Cash transfers, on the other hand, were cost-efficient, incentivized agricultural production and market activity, and allowed recipients to meet both food and non-food needs. However, it became evident in some cases that, while food transfers are usually controlled by women and therefore benefit children directly, cash was more likely to be controlled by men and often diverted to various uses that did not necessarily benefit women and children. Furthermore, cash transfers were extremely vulnerable to the volatile prices or inflation of the commodities they were intended to purchase, and in some contexts could even exacerbate inflation. Governments, multilateral organizations and donors have therefore sought to respond to these issues through various approaches, such as adopting cash transfers for social protection interventions or providing a combination of cash transfers and food aid.105 This dilemma represents one of many that surround the challenge of promoting the human rights of the urban poor, and therefore the spectrum of efforts and partnerships have greatly varied. This chapter provides a very small sample of efforts that have been made by various actors at the national, regional and international levels. 101 102 103 104 105 16 Ibid. For the treatment of undocumented immigrants in informal settlements, see Landau, “Shaping Urban Futures”. For the rights of non-citizens, see report E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/23. For a case study on the exclusion of the Roma minority, see Christian Bodewick and Akshay Sethi, Poverty, Social Exclusion and Ethnicity in Serbia and Montenegro: The Case of the Roma (New York, World Bank, 2005). See M. Fay, and others, “Natural disasters and the urban poor”, En Breve, No. 32 (2003). Ibid. See Rachel Sabates-Wheeler and Stephen Devereux, “Cash Transfers and High Food Prices: Explaining Outcomes on Ethiopia‟s Productive Safety Net Programme”, working paper 4 (DFID (2010).