July 17, 2012
In September 2000, Kenya was one of 189 countries that signed an international treaty called the Millennium Declaration. The object of the declaration was to define a common worldwide vision for development that was to be achieved by the year 2015.
The Kenyan government drafted these resolutions into a development paper of its own, entitled “Kenya Vision 2030.” The paper spells out how the government intends to turn Kenya into “a globally competitive and prosperous nation with a high quality of life by 2030.”
Kenya Vision 2030 is anchored on three key pillars: economic, social, and political governance. It contains a pledge to improve the quality of life of all Kenyans, including those living in substandard conditions within the major city slums.
To achieve this, the government created a initiative called the Kenya Slum Upgrading Program (KENSUP), which took the form of a partnership between the government and UN-HABITAT.
The flagship project for the KENSUP program was launched in 2007 and concerned the village of Soweto, one of Kibera slum’s 17 villages. The project aimed specifically to facilitate the provision of secure tenure, improved housing, income-generating activities, and physical and social infrastructure.
The problem: Beneficiaries priced out of the project
The Soweto KENSUP project was set up so as to incorporate community participation right from the planning stages.
The government and its partner UN-HABITAT created a community-led committee to help with social mobilization and communication with Soweto residents. Judging by the project outcomes, however, this undertaking was not entirely successful.
Today, the 600 residential units in the upgraded compound house roughly half of the residents the project was originally intended to benefit. The other half, finding that they were unable to cope with the higher cost of living that came with the upgrade, quickly returned to the slums, either renting out or selling their assigned apartments to wealthier families.
Marykevin Njengo, 26, is an original project beneficiary who still lives in her assigned apartment. According to her, she has been able to keep the apartment only because her husband was able to obtain the tender to set up a company tasked with keeping the compound clean.
Before moving into her new quarters, Njengo says, she used to pay almost no rent, and the transition from paying almost nothing to paying 3000 Ksh (about US$35) each month has been difficult for her family.
Rent money is also meant to cover water and waste removal, but does not cover electricity. With respect to the provision of water, Njengo notes, the government has not lived up to its promise. According to her, households on the compound only receive running water once a week, which forces them to head back into the slums to purchase water from private sellers.
Njengo says 600Ksh from her rent goes toward water. Adding the monthly 1000Ksh she pays to the private sellers, her monthly total for water is somewhere in the region of $20, significantly higher than what a middle-class household would pay.
The framework and its pitfalls
The aim of the Soweto project was to create three-bedroom apartments that would be rented out at a subsidized price to the beneficiaries. The premise was that with three bedrooms, a beneficiary family could rent two of the bedrooms out to help them cover their rent.
The apartments themselves are small by anyone’s standards; still, the government apparently expected tenants to find a way to be comfortable housing unknown people at such close quarters.
Generally speaking, most household units in the slums make do with one room in which they live, work, cook, and sleep. Many of the people in these informal settlements are recent migrants from the countryside who don’t find the idea of sharing a room with five other members of their extended family so unthinkable.
In constructing these relatively pricey three-bedroom apartments, the government failed to take into account the way people actually lived. By putting people on the third floor of an apartment block, the government also deprived many households of their main source of income — the shack from which they could run their business on the side of the road in plain view of passers-by.
While some of the residents have set up little market stalls around the estate, many of them simply return to the slum in the daytime to operate their businesses as they did before.
Furthermore, although there were references within the project to providing a community centre and sports ground for the youth, no sign of these amenities appear in the compound today.
Outcome: a possible way forward
Although the upgraded Soweto estate looks like a fairly standard municipal housing compound, it appears to have come up short in its main objective: significantly upgrading the standard of living of all of Soweto’s residents. What went wrong?
First, for a slum upgrading project of this kind to work, the intervention mustbe accompanied by significantly expanded opportunities to generate income. Without that essential element, residents will not be able to afford the change of lifestyle.
Conversely, a slum upgrading project that does not increase the cost of life for its residents would undoubtedly have a significantly greater rate of success.
Furthermore, such projects must allow for the fact that there will always be some lower-middle-income family, perhaps living in a squalid single-room multi-story building, that can afford to buy out the intended beneficiaries — who will, as a result, almost certainly find themselves in exactly the same position as before.
Finally, future slum upgrading initiatives in Nairobi might do well, on the one hand, to focus on providing some type of security of tenure to slum dwellers — while, on the other hand, actually upgrading the roads and providing water, sanitation, electricity, and waste collection. Security of land tenure would allow residents to freely upgrade their living quarters without fear of a rent hike from their landlords; infrastructure improvement would allow them to operate and successfully expand their businesses without having to relocate. Combined, these elements would constitute significant progress toward delivering on the promises of Kenya Vision 2030.
Source: urb.im
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