N/D 02 8-40 - worldwatch.org · of his Nairobi neighborhood to take in the view. ... On city maps,...

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Where the Sidewalks Endby Molly O’Meara Sheehan

Working for a Sustainable Future

For more information about Worldwatch Institute and its programs and publications, pleasevisit our website at www.worldwatch.org

Excerpted from November/December 2002 WORLD WATCH magazine© 2002 Worldwatch Institute

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WORLD•WATCH November/December 200220

Squinting in thesunlight, GeorgeNg’ang’a leads me up a moundof dirt and rubbish on the edgeof his Nairobi neighborhood totake in the view. To the southunfolds a safari scene of grassyplains dotted with acacia bushesas far as I can see. To the northstands a dense gathering of gan-gly shacks cobbled togetherwith cloth, mud, tin, rocks, andsheets of plastic. There are about 800 homes in allcrowded onto some 5 to 6 hectares, says Ng’ang’a.

On city maps, the location of this settlement—called “Mtumba” by the 6,000 people who live there—shows up as prime habitat for rhino and giraffe. That’sbecause this unsanctioned community lies on the edgeof Nairobi National Park. Mtumba is only one of themany slums around Nairobi. In fact, more than half ofthe residents of Kenya’s capital city cannot afford to livein “formal” housing, and have been forced to find shel-ter in slums like this one.

Ng’ang’a turns to me and tells me to call him “Cas-tro,” which, he says, is his nickname. He has the

physique of a bear and is clean shaven, but he insistshe was thin and bearded in his youth. I’m not sure if

Where the SidewalksEnd One out of every seven people now lives in

a slum—or at least that’s the UN’s bestestimate. More and more slum residents are organizing to improve their lot, astheir numbers swell in cities all over the world.

by Molly O’Meara Sheehan

nairobi “When you wake up in the morning,the important thing to do first is to find outwhere are your shoes. Why shoes are useful: whenyou walk without them your legs can get injuredby anything dangerous like bones, thorns andmany others. So I will suggest that shoes are themost useful object in our home.”—Serah Waithera,a 15-year old girl living in Nairobi’s Mathareslum. Reprinted from: Shootback: Photos by Kidsfrom the Nairobi Slums (London: Booth-ClibbornEditions, 1999).

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November/December 2002 WORLD•WATCH 21

he’s joking about the physical resemblance, but it’sclear that he’s passionate and politically active. For sev-eral years in a row the people of Mtumba have chosenCastro to be the leader of the community’s governingcouncil in informal elections—informal because thecity government does not serve slums, so the peopleof Mtumba have found their own ways to organize andpolice themselves.

“We can’t depend on the government for any-thing,” says Castro as we walk through the settlement.One of his neighbors, a solemn man named Tom

Werunga, joins inour stroll. Werunga,who carries a Bible,tells me that he’s apastor. He pointsout a water tap—oneof two small spigotsthat supply water forthe entire settlement.But no city water ispiped here. Instead,these taps are fed byprivate companiesthat truck in tanks.And they sell theirwater at a premium.As of yet, no companyhas seen fit to estab-lish any sort of busi-ness setting up toiletsor sewers. Instead the6,000 people who livehere share three flimsypit latrines. “Flyingtoilets,” I learn, arebaggies of humanexcrement that areflung atop roofs or intorubbish piles.

I am scribblingnotes, trying to payattention to the latrinesCastro is showing me,

but my eyes are stinging in the acrid air. Cinders andfumes from untended piles of burning trash mingle withash and smoke from charcoal cooking fires wherewomen prepare meals. At night, kerosene fumes fromlanterns join the stew. More than 80 percent of Nairobi’shouseholds use charcoal for cooking, but the air isworst in neighborhoods such as this, which lack bothelectricity and trash removal.

Everything in Mtumba, it seems, is insecure andinformal. There is no land ownership. There is no pub-lic infrastructure. And there is no protection provided

by the law. Mtumba’s families have moved together twicebefore, says Castro. They landed in this location in1992. Since then Nairobi officials have threatened toevict the community several times. And on one occa-sion, he says, officials sent in bulldozers to completelydemolish the settlement. Some families have seen theirhomes destroyed as many as 10 times. “Every day weare waiting for the demolition squad,” says Castro.“We are refugees in our own country.”

It is neighborhoods likeMtumba--not Greenwich Village in Manhattanor the Rive Gauche in Paris—that are setting the trendsfor modern urban living. The UN estimates that some-where between 835 million and 2 billion people nowlive in some type of slum, whether in a kampung inIndonesia, a favela in Brazil, a gecekondu in Turkey, ora katchi abadi in Pakistan. The population of slumdwellers in some of the world’s largest cities—Bombay,Bogotá, and Cairo, for example—now outnumbers thepopulation of people living in formal housing.

In many cities—particularly in sub-Saharan Africaand South Asia—explosive urban growth is combiningwith the world’s worst poverty to fuel the proliferationof slums. The world’s population increased by 2.4 bil-lion in the past 30 years, and half of that growth wasin cities. Over the next three decades, global popula-tion is expected to increase by another 2 billion. Demog-raphers expect that nearly all of that population increasewill end up in developing-country cities, due to urbanmigration and high birth rates (see graph, page 23).

While most poor people still live in rural areas,poverty is rapidly urbanizing. As of 1998, more than1.2 billion people were living in extreme poverty (onless than the equivalent of about $1 a day), unable tomeet even basic food needs. Martin Ravallion of theWorld Bank estimates that the urban share of the world’sextreme poverty is currently 25 percent. He projectsthat it is likely to reach 50 percent by 2035.

A number of factors are driving the growth of citiesworldwide. Rural economies in many regions have beenhard hit by environmental degradation, military or eth-nic conflicts, and the mechanization of agriculture,which has curbed the number of rural jobs. The prospectof better-paying jobs has drawn many people to cities.

Latin America is by far the most urbanized regionof the developing world. About 75 percent of peoplein Latin America live in cities—along with 75 percentof the poor. While only 37 and 38 percent of Asiansand Africans live in cities respectively, a number ofnations in these regions are beginning to see povertyshift to urban centers. For instance, the proportion ofpeople living below the poverty line in rural Kenyabetween 1992 and 1996 increased from 48 to 53 per-cent, while the share of people living below the poverty

© Jens Grossman/Laif/Aurora

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line in Nairobi doubled from 25 to 50 percent.Castro tells me that his family’s land was taken by

the colonial Kenyan government in 1952 to build a golfcourse. “My father was a businessman,” he says, “so wewent to different places, like nomads.” Castro contin-ued the itinerant lifestyle as a young man, but then hegot married and began looking for a better life for hisfamily. Eventually, he says, “we came to the Nairobislums, even though I have an education.”

In general, the “off-the-books” nature of Mtumba and otherinformal communities confers certain advantages. Rentsare lower than in formal housing. There are no prop-erty taxes. Residents can skirt cumbersome zoning lawsthat separate housing from businesses, and set up shopinside their homes or just outside. Mtumba’s com-mercial strip boasts rows of brightly painted store-fronts, each about

1 meter wide. There are produce stands, coffee shops,a “movie house” showing videos, a barber shop, and anoutfit that collects old newspapers. But the short-termbenefits of living and working outside the formal econ-omy rarely outweigh the long-term costs to residents—and to the cities that have failed to address their needs.

Slums are often located in a city’s least-desirable loca-tions—situated on steep hillsides, in floodplains, ordownstream from industrial polluters—leaving resi-dents vulnerable to disease and natural disasters. Anotherlong-term cost is the premium residents pay for basicservices. The African Population and Health ResearchCenter recently released a report showing that Nairobi’sslum dwellers pay more than residents of wealthy hous-ing estates for water—and, as a result, use less than isadequate to meet health needs. “A family needs 100liters per day for drinking and cleaning,” says Mtumba’s

Tom Werunga. As that much water costs 25 Kenyanshillings (30 cents), it could easily eat up half theincome of people who, on average, make about50 to 60 shillings (60 to 75 cents) per day.

Landlords operating in slums can easily gougetheir tenants without fear of legal recourse. Andthe proportion of renters in slums is higher thancommonly thought, as vacant land close toemployment opportunities tends to be quicklydeveloped by enterprising landlords. In fact,four out of five slum residents in Nairobi arerenters, according to a study done by the Kenyangovernment and UN-HABITAT, the UNagency for human settlements, which happensto be headquartered in Nairobi. The shacks arelucrative investments, finds the survey, yield-ing a return in less than two years (comparedto 10 to 15 years in the formal property mar-ket). Yet landlords do not typically reinvesttheir profits in the shacks by repairing themor hooking them up to electricity or water, andtenants have no way to hold landlordsaccountable.

Lacking adequate access to water, toilets,and trash removal, crowded slums also breeddiseases that threaten the public health ofentire cities. More than half of Nairobi’s 3million people live in slums, squeezed intojust 5 percent of the city’s land area. Inurban centers throughout the developing

world, the AIDS virus is facilitating outbreaks oftuberculosis—and both diseases are spreading rap-idly. In the Nairobi slums, the mortality rate of chil-dren under five years of age is 151 per 1,000 births,far higher than the average of 61 per 1,000 for the cityas a whole.

Economic inequalities may significantly hamperpublic health, according to several new studies. The Soci-

nairobi Families living in slums often have

no access to state-sponsored educati

on. Lacking

government support, the Mtumba slum

in Nairobi

pooled resources for a schoolhouse.

Community

members built the structure, and no

w support

four teachers.

© 2002 Horst Rutsch, UN Chronicle

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ety and Population Health Reader has brought togetherjournal articles showing that economic inequality in theUnited States and parts of Europe correlates withreduced public health. In Nairobi, where slums occa-sionally abut posh, gated enclaves, the economic dis-parities are as glaring as the public health nightmare.

The growth of slums in an era of unprecedented eco-nomic prosperity may also contribute to tensions thatthreaten local, national, and even global security. “Poorurban settlements are breeding grounds for disease,crime, and terrorism,” warned Anna Tibaijuka, thehead of UN-HABITAT, in April 2002. While desper-ate situations may foster problems, it is the poor whoare disproportionately the victims of crime. Some slumsare crime ridden and other are nearly crime free, butthose that lack municipal or community policing are usu-ally more dangerous.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in theUnited States, New York Times columnist Tom Fried-man wrote that in an increasingly interconnected world,it will be impossible to ignore the problems of peopleliving in desperate conditions at home or abroad: “ifyou don’t visit a bad neighborhood, a bad neighbor-hood will visit you.”

Walking again with Castro, Iam being pursued by a friendly, gigglingswarm of small children, none taller than my waist. Theywant to hold my hands. My tour guide is talking about

the three vehicles owned by various people in Mtumba—one old car and two bicycles—but my attention isdrawn to the children. Many of them have no shoes,yet are following us over sharp rocks, human and ani-mal waste, and all sorts of garbage.

I looked at the kids’ feet and I cringed. It is

MEXICO

PANAMA

GUATEMALAHONDURAS

EL SALVADOR

TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

BOLIVIA

COLOMBIA

VENEZUELA

PERU

ECUADOR

PARAGUAY

KENYA

ETHIOPIA

NIGERMALI

NIGERIA

NAMIBIA

SOUTH AFRICA

TANZANIA

MADAGASCAR

MOZAMBIQUEBOTSWANA

ZAMBIA

CENTRAL AFRICANREPUBLIC

UGANDA

LESOTHO

MALAWI

RWANDACÔTE

D'IVOIRE

SIERRA LEONE

BURKINAFASO

GAMBIA

ZIMBABWE

SENEGALPAKISTAN

INDIA

C H I N A

TURKMENISTAN

NEPAL

BANGLADESH

I N D O N E S I A

MONGOLIA

U. K.

urban poverty By 2007 more than half of

the world’s population will reside in cities. In

the next 30 years the global population isexpected to grow by 2 billion, and demographers

project that developing-country cities—many of

which are already faced with dire poverty—will

be the locations of most of that growth.

Countries with urban growth rate over 4 percent(1990-2000)(SMALL ISLAND STATES NOT SHOWN)

Countries where at least 10 percent of the populationlives on less than $1 a day(THESE COUNTRIES ARE NAMED)

Moving to the Cities:Population growth in urban and rural areas

Poverty andCities Collide

8

6

4

2

02000

Billio

n pe

ople

1970 2030

URBAN

Developing countriesIndustrial countries

RURAL

Developing countriesIndustrial countries

Sources: World Urbanization Prospects: The 1999 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2001); and World Development Indicators (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2001)

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impossible to watch bright-eyed children play intoxic trash and human waste, and listen to their artic-ulate parents describe their efforts and their hopesto build a better life, and not feel obliged to helpsomehow. This well-intentioned impulse to help slumdwellers into better housing, however, has been car-ried out with rather disastrous consequences through-out history.

In the United States, for example, the 1949 Hous-ing Act paved the way for cities to raze blighted neigh-borhoods and build giant public housing projects tohouse the newly displaced inhabitants. Brazil, Colom-bia, Egypt, and South Korea were among the devel-oping nations that launched huge public housingcampaigns in the 1960s. These costly efforts destroyedthe networks of family and friends that poor people hadused to survive. Communities often had to move frominner-city locations to outlyingareas with fewer job prospects.Added transportation costs meantless could be spent on food. Inmany cases, the people whosehomes were destroyed could notafford the new public projects,which ended up housing wealthierresidents. “Urban renewal” proj-ects often had the perverse effect ofworsening living conditions for thepeople they were intended to help.

A major shift began to occur inthe 1970s, as city planners were facedwith the fact that poor people hadbeen improving their neighborhoodsmore effectively and with less moneythan many government projects.Drawing on his experiences workingin the slums of Lima, Peru in the1960s, British architect John F.C.Turner challenged the prevailingorthodoxy with his influential 1972book, Freedom to Build, warning thatofficials should stop doing more harmthan good.

Lacking city services, some communities have man-aged to close the gap themselves. One of the trailblaz-ers was Akhter Hameed Khan, who in 1980 beganmobilizing the community of Orangi, the largest squat-ter settlement in Karachi, Pakistan. He started a researchinstitute called the Orangi Pilot Project to help residentsorganize and build a sewer system. Each block collectedmoney and began construction of their own sewers,which served some 90 percent of Orangi’s residents bythe late 1990s. Between 1982 and 1991, infant mor-tality rates in the settlement dropped from 130 perthousand to 37 per thousand.

In the slums of Nairobi, com-munities long neglected by thegovernment are just beginning to gain some level ofpolitical effectiveness. In Mtumba, for instance, residentshave begun to organize. “On our own,” says TomWerunga, “we have built a school.” Four teachers jug-gle morning and afternoon shifts to teach more than400 children in three classrooms. The classroom I sawboasted a small chalkboard, and about 30 to 40 smallchildren, who jumped up smiling from their desks aswe passed (see photo, page 22).

With the help of a local nongovernmental organi-zation, the Pamoja Trust, Mtumba has started a sav-ings scheme and opened a bank account to pool funds.They hope to save up enough to purchase land at a bet-ter location. So far, they have saved about 300,000

rio de janeiro One out of every six of Rio’s

5.9 million residents lives in

a favela, or slum,

according to government esti

mates, but citizen’s

groups say the share is as h

igh as one-third of

the metro region’s 12 million

people. Entire commu-

nities have been wiped out b

y mudslides, as erosion

has claimed land under makes

hift houses on Rio’s

hillsides. “It raises doubts in

people’s minds if you

give an address here—you have to gi

ve a false

address to be treated fairly

,” said a woman in the

Nova Brasilia section of Rio

to U.S. scholar Janice

Perlman. A city-wide program

, Favela-Bairro, aims

to integrate these neighborh

oods into the city with

pavement, water, sewers, and

electricity.

Left: © Gabriel Fernando/Brazilphotos

© J.R.Ripper/BrazilPhotos

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Kenyan shillings ($3,800) altogether. According toPamoja Trust’s Jack Makau, his organization would liketo match the savings accrued by the Mtumba families,shilling for shilling, and help them invest it, to speedthe time necessary to reach the 5 million or so shillingsthat will be needed.

The residents of Mtumba and Nairobi’s other slumsare starting to flex some political muscle, bolstered bya city-wide federation, Muungano wa Wanavijiji. “Unityis strength,” says Jane Weru, the head of Pamoja Trust,which is supporting the federation in 40 of Nairobi’smore than 100 slums. Muungano members are settingup savings groups, which help build trust and can beturned into revolving loan funds. They are also collectingdata on their neighborhoods and sharing experiencesto help build coalitions that will help sway governmentpolicies in their favor.

Slum residents in Nairobi are also learning from theircounterparts around world, loosely organized bySlum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI). The Groupwas founded in 1996 when the Asian Coalition forHousing Rights joined forces with the South AfricanHomeless People’s Federation. Today, the group boastsmembers from Argentina, Cambodia, Colombia, India,Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia, Nepal, the Philippines,South Africa, Swaziland, Thailand, Zambia, and Zim-babwe. “A lot of what we do in Nairobi” says PamojaTrust’s Jack Makau, “has been tried out in other citiesby the SDI network.”

In recent years, these newcoalitions have articulatedground-breaking strategies for urban development,where governments engage slum dwellers as equal part-

Jockin Arputham is President of the National Slum DwellersFederation of India and leader of Slum Dwellers Interna-tional, a network of grassroots organizations in Cambodia,India, Kenya, South Africa and Thailand, among othercountries. He has led the struggle for housing rights in Mum-bai, India, since the 1970s, when he started the NationalSlum Dwellers Federation, which now spans 34 Indian cities.Rasna Warah, Editor of Habitat Debate, the journal ofUN-HABITAT, interviewed him during the World UrbanForum in Nairobi in April 2002. (Printed with permission.)

Rasna Warah: Tell me a bit about your background.

Jockin Arputham: I am a slum dweller who has lived inMumbai’s Mankhurd Janata Colony for the last 35 years. Iwas not always a slum dweller. I belonged to an uppermiddle class family, which lost everything in 1963. That iswhen I left my home in Kolargold Field for Bangalore andthen for Mumbai in 1964. I had never lived in a slumbefore that, so it was a new culture and new concept forme.

My first experience with activism was when I broughttogether children from the slum and organized them tocarry uncollected garbage in the slum and dump it in frontof the Mumbai Municipality’s offices. Then in 1974, Iinvited officers from the Municipality to visit our slum.The idea was to lock one of the officers in the public toiletfor a whole day, which we did. He was there for eighthours. In the end, the police had to take him out. But wehad made our point. That incident changed people’s atti-tudes towards cleanliness in public toilets.

RW: One of the main issues your organization agitates

around is that of toilets. Why is this such an importantissue for you?

JA: In India, a public toilet is not simply a toilet. Publictoilets are community centers where people meet toexchange news about what is happening in the community.When you go to a public toilet, you get all the news aboutthe settlement. In fact, today in India, if you want tomobilize people, you first go to the public toilets.

Besides, everyone needs to go to the toilet, so it is acommon uniting factor, especially in slums. The only dif-ference between middle class people and the urban poor isthat the former go to the toilet alone.

In India, 90 per cent of slum dwellers use public toiletsmaintained by the municipality. But I call these toilets“monuments” because the minute they become theresponsibility of the municipality, the service becomesdefunct. The National Slum Dwellers Federation has beenurging the government to allow slum communities to plan,design, construct, and maintain public toilets. As a result,in the city of Mumbai, we are now constructing toiletblocks—10,000 toilet seats in total. The Prime Ministerhas also given a grant of 10 billion rupees to build toiletsall over India. These toilets will be planned, designed andmaintained by the communities themselves.

RW: What is Slum Dwellers International?

JA: SDI is not a political movement or a social serviceorganization. It is a platform through which urban poorcommunities take responsibility for improving their lives. It is a voice of the urban poor. When the poor don’t takeresponsibility for their lives, everyone from NGOs to the

------------------------------------------toilet power

ners in efforts to improve communities. “We are notcoming here to beg,” declared Jockin Arputham, thehead of Slum Dwellers International, at UN-HABI-TAT’s World Urban Forum in Nairobi in May 2002.“We can sit together with you—national governments,city authorities, and bilateral aid agencies—to plan thecity” (see “Toilet Power” below).

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Where local and national governments have beenwilling to seriously engage those living in urban slums,the partnership has often produced significant results.But for the most part, governments still have a long wayto go to help address the problems faced by people liv-ing in slums. In general, slum leaders like Arputham haveidentified three key obstacles that governments mustsurmount in order to become more effective partners:

1) Home Security“Land is the key to implement any project for devel-

opment,” says a Mtumba woman who is involved in thecommunity’s self-run school. She explains that the peo-ple of her community have difficulty convincing them-selves—let alone anyone else—to invest in water, toilets,or any sort of improvement. Why bother if the neigh-borhood could be bulldozed the next day? Indeed, a

World Bank will take this responsibilityaway from them. They will tell you how to live, how toeat, how to dress. They will even tell you how to use a toi-let. What nonsense! I am an adult, why should anyonecontrol my life? However, instead of merely protestingagainst these institutions, we are going a step forward bysaying, “involve us.”

Institutions such as the World Bank have been unsuc-cessful in many cases because their projects lacked one keyingredient—the involvement of the community. Forinstance, the World Bank once took seven years to build

one toilet in a slum in Mumbai. Seven years! Why? Becausethey spent much of the time “studying” Indian culture,Indian values, even Indian ways of shitting. Tell me, howcan a consultant from London know these things?

But since the World Bank started to work with theNational Slum Dwellers Federation, we have managed tobuild 100 toilet blocks, or 2,200 toilets, within one year.At this rate, for the first time in the history of independentIndia, no one in Mumbai will have to squat on the streetsbecause there will be one public toilet for every 50 people.

RW: But don’t governments have a responsibility towardsthe urban poor? Shouldn’t they be providing these services?

JA: Certainly governments have this responsibility. Butthey are not doing it. We used to have the handoutapproach. But now we are saying that we need to splitresponsibility. In the case of toilets, we are saying to gov-ernments, “You pay the capital costs, but we will plan,design and maintain the toilets.”

RW: You still live in a slum, even though your economicconditions have improved. Why?

JA: I think I continue to live there because my wholelife’s work began there. Everything I learned, all theknowledge I gained, was from the slum. Besides, both mychildren are married and it is just me and my wife. Whywould we need a bigger place? I’ve lived in my currenthome for 15 years, why not another 25? If I move out, I’ll feel as if I exploited the very people who made mewho I am. I am very proud to be a slum dweller. I don’tsee my work as a job; it is my life.

"In India, if you want to mobilize people, you firstgo to the public toilets," says Jockin Arputham,president of National Slum Dwellers Federation ofIndia. In May 2002, his organization built a toileton the front lawn of the UN headquarters inNairobi to publicize the lack of public toilets andsewers in slums.

------------------------------------------

© Rasna Warah, UN-HABITAT

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central obstacle to any sort of “self-help” in many slumsis that the residents do not belong on the land wherethey live in the eyes of the law.

If governments were to grant people in informalsettlements legal recognition or titles to the propertywhere they live, it could open up new opportunitiesfor development, and even credit. Buildings withouttitles are “dead capital,” says Peruvian economist Her-nando de Soto. They are useful only for whatever shel-ter they provide. Buildings with titles, in contrast, canhave a second “life” in capital markets, where their own-ers can leverage them.

De Soto was instrumental in prompting Peru toundertake a massive titling program, which formalizedsome 1 million urban land parcels between 1996 and2000, first in the pueblos jovenes of Lima, and then inother cities. In his recent book, The Mystery of Capi-tal, de Soto suggests that titling programs could havea huge global impact. He esti-

mates that the value of real estate not legally owned inthe developing world and former Soviet bloc nationsis $9.3 trillion.

Granting titles to residents in much of Lima andsome other Latin American cities has been fairly straight-forward, as a number of informal settlements aroseafter groups of settlers planned “invasions” of unusedpublic lands. But in places like Kenya, many slums areon private land or on public land given—often underthe table—to large-scale shack builders, who rent outtheir tenement housing. Sorting out ownership can befurther complicated by a confusing mix of English landlaws and African customary laws. One new innovationin Kenya is a “community land trust,” which allows aneighborhood to collectively own its property, whileeach household retains some individual property rights.

This issue of secure land tenure is gaining in promi-nence. Heads of state meeting inNew York for the UN’s MilleniumSummit in 2000 pledged to improvethe lives of 100 million slum dwellersby 2020. The two measures of“improvement” are to be access tosanitation and security of tenure.When asked how improved securitywill be measured, Billy Cobbett ofthe Cities Alliance acknowledgesthat “it’s tricky.” Many govern-ments don’t count slum dwellers intheir censuses, let alone measuretheir sense of security.

2) EmploymentOpportunities

Most people come to citiesseeking jobs. And the slums thatmany of these people end up liv-ing in—with rickety homes,mounds of refuse, and inadequatewater supplies—could becomekey sources of employment. Atlittle cost, municipal authoritiescould employ slum dwellers to

build sewers, collect trash, compost organic waste, orotherwise improve their communities. If organic wasteis composted, it can be used to nourish urban agricul-ture, which can provide both food and jobs. Citiescould also revamp their policies on transportation, landuse, and small-scale credit to improve the ability of poorpeople to make a living.

In 2000, the Kenyan government committed itselfto working with the slum dwellers federation, localauthorities, and the UN on a seven year slum-upgrad-ing initiative. This program aims to make physicalimprovements—to extend roads and services into slums

mumbai (bombay) Some 40 percent of Mumba

i’s 18

million people live in s

lums or some type of deg

raded

housing, and 5 to 10 per

cent of the city lives o

n the

pavement, with no housin

g at all. They are crowd

ed

onto “8 percent of the l

and area of a city small

er

than the two New York b

oroughs of Manhattan an

d

Queens,” writes Arjun App

adurai of the University

of

Chicago in Environment

& Urbanization.

Right: © MARK EDWARDS/Peter Arnold

© Robb Kendrick/Aurora


toilets-----------If you think shar-ing a toilet withyour family isfrustrating, trysharing with 1,000families. Infectiousdiseases spreadquickly when thereare few sewers, andopen waterways areoften fouled bywaste.

money-------------Without propertyto leverage, youare hard pressedto get a reason-able loan. But anumber of slumshave started“revolving loanfunds,” whereresidents pooltheir savings forlocal use insmall-scale loans.

home--------------The perpetualthreat of eviction—because you do nothave legal claim tothe land where youlive—reduces yourincentive to improveyour surroundings.Peru has begun toaddress this dilemmaby issuing 1 millionproperty titles toslum residents.

educatION----------If you are lucky,your communityhas cobbledtogether a schoolfor your childrento attend, andcollectively sup-ports a teacher.

transportaTION-----------Your main mode oftransportation isyour feet, so hope-fully you canafford a pair ofshoes. Bicycles,buses, and jitneyscan greatly expandyour employmentopportunities bygetting you closerto workplaces.

garbage------------Instead of curb-side garbagepickup, you livewith curbsidegarbage dumps.Burning thegarbage—andcreating noxiousfumes—is howyou keep levelsof trash down.

cooking------------Unless you have access topropane or elec-tricity, you mustcook your mealsover a smokyfire pit burningcharcoal orscraps of wood.

water------Getting cleanwater can bedifficult orexpensive foryou. Localwaterways oftendouble as sewers,and water pipedin or brought intanks by truckcan eat up muchof your day’smeager earnings.

While no two slums in the world arealike, and conditions vary greatly, getting by in the “informal” world is aa daily struggle.

© MARK EDWARDS/Peter ArnoldNairobi slum

even in a slum, life goes on

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to connect them to the rest of the city. “We’re lookingat all possible sources of job generation,” says UN-HABITAT’s Chris Williams, including providing hous-ing, water, electricity, and other services.

Schemes to collect and compost organic waste—suchas paper, food scraps, and even human excrement—canhelp nurture urban gardens and reduce the problemsand costs of waste management while producing foodand money. The UN Development Programme esti-mates that 800 million urban farmers harvest 15 per-cent of the world’s food supply—and the share couldgrow if governments promoted, rather than discour-aged, the practice. Agriculture provides the highestself-employment earnings in small-scale enterprises inNairobi, and the third highest in all of urban Kenya.

High transportation costs limit poor people’s accessto jobs. Zoning laws that separate homes from busi-nesses discriminate against the poor, as do decisions toinvest in infrastructure for private cars, rather than ded-icated bus lanes, cheap transit, safe pedestrian walkways,or bicycle paths. “More than 95 percent of money thatis meant to tackle transport issues in Kenya goes tomotorization, while less than 5 percent of Kenyansactually own cars,” says Jeff Maganya of the Nairobioffice of the global Intermediate Technology Devel-opment Group (ITDG). Today more than 40 percentof Nairobi’s residents can’t afford to pay bus fares.

Most people would benefit if governments were toshift their priorities towards cheaper forms of trans-portation, including informal jitneys (small buses calledmatatus in Nairobi) and bicycles. For many years, highluxury taxes on bicycles and a large fee for registeringbicycles prevented poor people from buying and keep-ing them in Nairobi. Isaac Mburu, a bicycle mechanicwho lives in Mtumba, had his bicycle confiscated by localauthorities because he could not pay the fee. WhenKenya reduced its tax on bicycles from 80 percent to20 percent between 1986 and 1989, bicycle sales surgedby 1,500 percent.

Governments can also take steps to open up linesof credit in informal communities, not only for homeimprovement, but for small-business development.Even in the poorest neighborhoods, there are build-ings and money-making activities that could be lever-aged to increase economic opportunities and strengthencommunities. Nairobi’s jua kali, or “hot sun,” work-ers—street hawkers selling vegetables, motor parts, andall manner of goods and services—act as a crucial sourceof income for many poor people.

3) Government RepresentationA number of factors can contribute to silencing the

voices of the poor and limiting public scrutiny of keydecisions about how resources are allocated: collusionbetween politicians and real estate developers; gov-

ernment influence over or control of the press; or a weakcivil society, for example. The wealthy, even if a smallminority, simply have greater political power.

Government corruption also takes a dispropor-tionate toll on slum residents. “When you take a com-plaint to a local authority employed by the government,”says Isaac Mburu, who lives in Nairobi’s Mtumba slum,“if you go without cash, you won’t be served.” While67 percent of all Kenyans surveyed recently by Trans-parency International-Kenya said that interactions withpublic officials required bribes, 75 percent of the poor-est and least educated said they were forced to paybribes. An independent fact-finding team visited Kenyain March 2000 and concluded that “the land and hous-ing situation is characterized by forced evictions, mis-allocation of public land, and rampant land grabbingthrough bureaucratic and political corruption.” Accord-ing to Transparency International’s Michael Lippe,“corruption is a tax on the poor.”

In some parts of the world, however, corruption isbeing thwarted by community organizers and com-mitted leaders. Porto Alegre, Brazil has become famousfor a municipal budgeting experiment started in 1989that invites citizens to engage in setting public priori-ties and shows people how funds are allocated. A sur-vey done after the first year of participatory budgetingin Porto Alegre revealed that the process had amplifiedthe voices of the city’s poor. Most of that city’s slumpopulation had indicated that clean water and toiletswere their highest priority, whereas the government pre-viously assumed that public transport was at the top oftheir list.

Today, more than 200 cities in Latin America haveintroduced participatory budgeting. In July 2001,Brazil enacted a national “City Statute” that requires

Jorge Hardoy, Diana Mitlin, and David Satterthwaite,Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World (London:Earthscan, 2001)

Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on HumanSettlements 2001 (Nairobi: UN-HABITAT, 2001)

Environment &Urbanization journal: www.iied.org/eandu

Habitat Debate journal: www.unhabitat.org/hd

World Bank, “Upgrading Urban Communities,”www.worldbank.org/html/fpd/urban//urb_pov/up_body.htm

For information about Shack/Slum Dwellers International(SDI) go to: www.homeless-international.org

For information on Nairobi’s Pamoja Trust, contact [email protected]

---------------------for further

information

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In Nairobi, citizens convened the first ever NairobiCivic Assembly in January 2002 to demand that the gov-ernment open itself up to all citizens, including the poormajority. “We have a city without citizens because mostof them have no voice,” said Davinder Lamba, thehead of the local human rights group, Manzigira Insti-tute. Participants discussed how they might tackle anumber of specific problems, from the city council’s fail-ure to provide water in poor neighborhoods to corrupt“land-grabbing” by public officials.

Neighborhood by neighbor-hood, things are beginning to change. Foryears, whenever residents of a Nairobi slum calledHuruma Ghetto tried to repair their homes, the citycouncil blocked them, forcing them to pay bribes orforbidding their efforts on the grounds that they were

squatters on public land. The com-munity’s initial efforts to organizethemselves to overcome theseobstacles met with failure. Once,when the community collectivelyrefused to pay the bribes, theirhouses were set ablaze.

Banding together, and fortifiedby allies, Huruma Ghetto’s residentsare getting local authorities to workwith them, rather than against them.In May 2002, I watched as theHuruma Ghetto held a ground-breaking ceremony for a modelhome paid for by its locally organ-ized savings group and approved forconstruction by the Nairobi citycouncil. Residents of Mathare,Mtumba, and other Nairobi slums,as well as activist friends from all overthe world (including JockinArputham of Slum Dwellers Inter-national), came to Huruma Ghetto totake part.

“With the savings scheme, we arenot only collecting money, we arecollecting people,” says DavidMwaniki, a 37-year old father of fivewho makes a living hawking uten-sils. He also serves as the assistant tothe secretary of Huruma’s communitycouncil, which organized the savings

group. “We want to eradicate poverty, and we wantpeople living in informal settlements all over the worldto join us, so we can wipe out slums.”

Molly O’Meara Sheehan is a senior researcher at theWorldwatch Institute.

manila More than one-half of Asia’s urban resi-dents live in slums, according to a recent article inthe Harvard International Review. In the Philippines,poor people have settled in slum dwellings along thebanks of Manila’s Pasig River, where they risk beingwashed away by floods.

© A. Appelbe/UNEP/Peter Arnold

municipalities to include citizens in urban planningand management, through participatory budgeting,among other measures. While only a small share of acity budget is usually up for grabs, the process does getimportant issues on the agenda and helps thwart cor-ruption.

In Bombay, both the municipality and poor neigh-borhoods have gained as a result of the evolving part-nership between local authorities and the national slumdwellers federation. “Fifteen years ago, we were justtrying to get poor people to be part of the city,” saidSheela Patel, director of the India-based Society for thePromotion of Area Resource Centres. “Now there’s arealization that this is a key component of good gov-ernance.” For example, she says, “when hawking is ille-gal, the municipality loses 170 million rupees ($3.5million) per month by not giving the hawkers licenses.”

N/D 02 8-40 - worldwatch.org · of his Nairobi neighborhood to take in the view. ... On city maps,...

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Transcript of N/D 02 8-40 - worldwatch.org · of his Nairobi neighborhood to take in the view. ... On city maps,...