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PRESS STATEMENT: Signing of a MoA with eThekwini Municipality

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MEDIA RELEASE

4 September 2018

The South African Slum/Shack Dwellers International Alliance (SA SDI Alliance) enters into an agreement with Ethekwini Municipality

The SA SDI Aliiance (an alliance of 2 social movements and 2 support NGOs, namely the Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDUP), the Informal Settlement Network (ISN), the Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC) and uTshani Fund), is proud of its longstanding partnership with the Durban metro going back over 20 years.  But this Memorandum of Agreement represents a major step upwards for this partnership giving it the basis for significantly scaling our work and improving the lives of tens of thousands of poor households.

We will endeavor to deliver on our side of the agreement across the city. However we must place it on record that we do not have a presence in all informal settlements in Ethekwini Metro. In many of these settlements we will have to work with other Community Based Organisations and networks. We welcome this – besides our international experience tells us that in order to upgrade settlements and build inclusive cities you need inclusive partnerships.

As the UN asserted in relation to the SDGs – we must leave no one behind. Not one single person. Not one family. Not one settlement and not one Organisation.

Issued by SA SDI Alliance
Kwanda Lande
Website: https://sasdialliance.org.za/
Email: research@corc.co.za
Facebook: South African SDI Alliance || Twitter: @SASDIAlliance

Together We Can Achieve More: Solidarity as a Key to Community Building

By CORC, FEDUP, ISN, News No Comments

The following narrative is part of a broader and in-depth documentation of the Ruo Emoh project. This documentation includes a video and booklet and is the result of collaborative efforts between the SA SDI Alliance, People’s Environmental Planning, UCT & University of Basel Master students (part of the City Research Studios hosted by African Centre for Cities), and the community of Ruo Emoh. A more detailed description of the Ruo Emoh project can be found here.

Interviewee: Farida Gester
Interviewers and Text: Majaha Dlamini & Janine Eberle

Farida_Gester

 “Not waiting for others to help you out, but working together for a common goal, that is the key to Ruo Emoh’s success.”

Farida Gester grew up in Wynberg where her parents rented a place. She was happily living with her happy big family. Farida chuckles when thinking back of that time staying with her parents, four brothers and three sisters.

In about 1980 – Farida was around 21 years old – her family was pushed to live further outside the city. “The owners of the house in Wynberg claimed it for themselves. My parents only rented it and that time it was still apartheid.” Farida explains. The whole family moved to Lentegeur in Mitchells Plain, where they lived together for 30 years. When Farida talks about that time, she speaks of her father as a very sociable person, who welcomed all people into their home, regardless of their skin colour. There would always be visitors around the house, especially when her brothers scouted teammates to play football with them. When Farida’s two sons were old enough, they would also play football in her father’s team, with people from different townships. Her mother used to cook for all the people and everybody would have a good time.

Her parents also supported her after she had a bad accident on her way to work. That is now 20 years ago, her children were still little. Farida was working as a machinist in a factory at that time, but after the accident she was forced to live off a disability grant from the state. It was very difficult for her to get by without her regular income, but her parents always supported her, like they did with all their children. With the years, her parents got ill and after her mother’s death, Farida did the cooking for everyone who visited their house or came by to play football. When also her father died, Farida decided to move out. The house in Lentegeur had only 3 rooms and was very crowded. With her siblings, nieces, nephews and in-laws living there all together, she had wanted to find a more spacious place for a long time, but she stayed for the sake of her parents, whom she cared for and looked after. It was important to them that the family stayed together. So after they passed away, Farida’s oldest son who was living in a two-room house in Portland, asked her to move in with his family. That is now 8 years ago. In Portland, Farida shared a room with the 3 grandchildren, two girls and one boy. Meanwhile, her younger son and his family were staying in the backyard of other people in Lentegeur.

A community that might become a family

In December 2017, when Farida could finally move into her house in Ruo Emoh, she decided to take her younger son and his family with her. Farida is very happy to finally have her own house and her family is excited to live there. It will still take a while for her to see how this move will change her life in the long run, she says. For her, the move from Portland to Ruo Emoh was not such a big change, since she was already living in a house before. Also, they’re sharing a room with her other grandchildren. The living situation did not significantly change her everyday life. For her younger son’s family it is different because their former place in Lentegeur was not as spacious and they had to pay a high rent to be able to stay. Their move from the backyard to Ruo Emoh marked a significant shift in their lives. Certainly, everyone is more comfortable here than where we lived before, Farida says.

It was 6 or 7 years ago when Farida joined the Ruo Emoh community. She heard about the project from the beginning when her neighbours in Lentegeur were talking about it. But since she was still living in her parent’s house with her whole family, she preferred to stay there. She cared for her parents when they were not longer fit and needed someone to look after them. It was only when she moved to Portland with her oldest son, she decided to join the community. It wasn’t easy, but her family supported her so that she could contribute to the saving scheme. When there were functions or meetings, she would always be there and help to push forward the project. She appreciates all the hard work everyone in the community has put into its success. The biggest obstacle in the process, in her view, was the city not cooperating with them. It is hard to see why the city didn’t let them build their own houses; why they had to make it such a long and hard struggle. The neighbourhood ratepayers also added to the problem; they did not want Ruo Emoh to be built. Farida says that they thought the new houses would be low-class houses and this would be bad for the area. Their resentment was nothing personal and Farida is positive that the relationship will improve over time, now that they can get to know each other. “It has to.” she chuckles.

Farida has visions for her house, but it will take time to really decide on what to build. For now, she is very happy with how everything look. At some point she would like to extend a veranda, build another wall outside the house and add another room. It is even possible that they will add a second floor at some point. Time will show- for now, they like it as it is. She hopes that this project will spread so that more places like Ruo Emoh will exist in the future.

Social cohesion and the feeling of solidarity are very important for Farida. This is how she grew up living with her family and also how she explains the success of Ruo Emoh. Everyone is like family here and looks after one another. This is how Ruo Emoh has been able to achieve so much. “Not waiting for others to help you out, but working together for a common goal, that is the key to Ruo Emoh’s success,” Farida says.

Whose Land is it Anyway? Unity and Divisions in the Development of Joe Slovo

By Archive, CORC, FEDUP, News, Resources, SDI No Comments

By Evelyn Benekane (on behalf of FEDUP) and Kwanda Lande (on behalf of CORC)

The “land issue” is probably the most debated topic in South Africa today. This is after a motion was passed by the parliament of South Africa to establish an ad hoc Constitutional Review Committee, to “review and amend section 25 of the Constitution to make it possible for the state to expropriate land in the public interest without compensation”. Currently, debates are reduced to land expropriation and neglect related issues such as land management challenges.

In this piece we share what some of these land management challenges look like for FEDUP in the Eastern Cape, where the Joe Slovo community has been struggling to access land for housing. In particular, the Federation experience highlights how conflicting interests around the Joe Slovo Communal Property Association (CPA) acted as a major impediment for Joe Slovo community members to access houses and title deeds.

“For the past 20 years the community of Joe Slovo was divided between two groups contesting the status of the Joe Slovo CPA. This left people without houses. People are struggling to buy electricity because they are not registered owners due to maladministration. There are no individual title deeds…”

(Evelyn Benekane)

This piece is an outcome of desktop research and interviews with Evelyn Benekane (FEDUP regional coordinator), who also wrote down the original content for this piece. She has been a community activist in Joe Slovo since the beginning of the settlement and she led the mobilising process to acquire land for housing since in 1995. Evelyn Benekane also acted as a signatory on behalf of the community when the Joe Slovo Community Property Association (CPA) was established in 1997 as part of the land restitution programme of South Africa . She was also elected as a spokesperson of the land committee, a platform for negotiating with the landowner and the municipality.

Joe Slovo Context and Its Development History

Joe Slovo is a settlement established in 1995 by organised members of the FEDUP. The settlement started as an informal settlement and was later developed into a formal housing (RDP) settlement. It is located on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth CBD and in proximity to the small CBD of Dispatch. The Joe Slovo community has attracted new residents over the past 21 years, mostly coming from the nearby rural areas in the hope of finding a better life in the city.

Taken in 2016 by Joubert Loots, this panorama picture of Joe Slovo demonstrate some of the housing typology and infrastructure.

Taken in 2016 by Joubert Loots, this panorama picture of Joe Slovo demonstrate some of the housing typology and infrastructure.

The idea of establishing Joe Slovo began in 1994, when residents of Veeplaas (an informal settlement in Port Elizabeth) became aware of the idea of coming together to save. This was a result of an exchange organised by FEDUP in the Eastern Cape to bring different informal settlements in Port Elizabeth to share experiences to alleviate poverty. In this meeting FEDUP introduced savings as a pivotal tool for alleviating poverty and accessing housing. In 1995 Injongo Zama Afrika savings scheme was started by informal residents of Veeplaas with the objective to acquire land and build housing by using their savings.

One of the important moments in the existence of the Injongo Zama Afrika savers was in 1995 when they identified 263 hectares of land. This land, owned by Sunridge Estate and Development Corporation (a big land developer that owned land in the area), had been lying unattended for 50 years. As a result, Injongo Zama Afrika members decided to occupy the plot and then, establish their shacks on it. In parallel, members formed the land committee as a platform for negotiations with the owners and Evelyn Benekane was elected as group spokesperson. Sunridge Estate and Development Corporation priced the land at R2million, a price that was too high for the community.

In the meantime, the municipality wanted to evict the people living in the settlement but they managed to stay since they had already started negotiating with the landowner. As the community did not have money to purchase the land, it was assisted by People’s Dialogue (a support organisation to the Federation at the time) that made contact with the Department of Land Affairs (DLA). The community had developed a Residential and Agricultural Plan that they  submitted and which was accepted by DLA. The outcome of this process was the formation of a Communal Property Association named by members as the Joe Slovo CPA.

Community Led Development in Joe Slovo

In 1997, a deed of transfer was granted by the DLA to the Joe Slovo CPA with Evelyn Benekane as the chairperson and signatory on behalf of the CPA. This encouraged the community to start designing their layout plan and, with the support of People’s Dialogue, hired Ulwazi Engineering services to formalise the plan and submit a proposal for housing and infrastructure development. This comprised water and sewer installation, and a total of 1940 houses, which were to be built in different phases. The members wanted to demonstrate how much could be done with little money in a short period of time, as the municipality did not make further plans for development.

The Joe Slovo community meets in 1997. Pictured in the white shirt on the left is community leader Evelyn Benekane.

The Joe Slovo community meets in 1997. Pictured in the white shirt on the left is community leader Evelyn Benekane.

In order to start phase one, Injongo Zama Afrika members accessed R1 million from uTshani Fund in 1997 to finance water and sewer installation for 340 structures. In the same year, the land was rezoned for township and agricultural use. The funds for bulk infrastructure and high mast lights were also approved by uTshani. To assist in paying this loan, the community decided to negotiate with the National Department of Human Settlements and Department of Land Affairs. This was after the community began experiencing some difficulties in repaying their loan to uTshani Fund. 

After 2000, the Injongo Zama Afrika saving scheme struggled to encourage members to save, as the ward councillor convinced people, that the development of Joe Slovo should be taken over by the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. By this time, the infrastructure for the 340 sites was already installed for phase one but not complete. Struggling to pay back the borrowed money for the infrastructure development, the savers decided to approach the National Department of Human Settlements (DHoS). They explained that the municipality had not made immediate plans for infrastructure development for Joe Slovo. The request was for the community to be given money to install infrastructure as there was no agreement with the municipality to install infrastructure.

Subsequently, the DoHS considered a policy that says all communities that were given land through CPAs must be given money to install infrastructure for the duration that there is no agreement with municipalities. By the time an agreement would be reached with municipalities, including approval of plans to install infrastructure, the money allocated can then be given back to the DoHS. As a result, the R1 million borrowed from uTshani Fund was paid back by the DoHS. Nevertheless, uTshani Fund decided to plough the money back, so that the installation of phase one – water and sewage – could be completed.

Divisions in the Community

Since then, internal conflicts in the Joe Slovo CPA have created challenges. Since 1999, the community became more divided. On the one hand there was a group, led by CPA members that pushed for the CPA to go forward with applications for housing and title deeds. On the other hand, there was a group led by a local ward councillor that wanted to dissolve the CPA and hand over responsibilities for the land and housing project to the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro Municipality. 

Meanwhile, in Joe Slovo, the CPA had already negotiated for phase one infrastructure and pursued agricultural projects. By 2000 the application for service installation in the second portion of the 1600 sites was already complete. However, the remainder who had not received services were getting impatient that it would take a long time to access services through loans. Instead they wanted the municipality to do the installation. This was fuelled by a promise from the local ward councillor that the municipality would install services only after the Joe Slovo land was transferred to the municipality. At one point the community even stopped saving, as word got around that government was giving away free houses.

At the time, the CPA had already applied for Provincial Institutional Subsidies to fast track housing delivery for those that had not received houses. An institutional subsidy is a government grant designed for institutions that provide the option of tenure arrangements to beneficiaries instead of immediate ownership. This housing subsidy was in the process of being approved, but the community did not accept it, because they wanted immediate ownership of their houses with title deeds. After the community had amended their initial application, they applied for People’s Housing Process (PHP) housing in the year 2003, which was approved. PHP is a process where beneficiaries are actively involved in the decision making over the housing process, product and make a contribution towards the building of their own houses.

Taken by Saga, in 2016 shows one of the agricultural project in Joe Slovo and incomplete houses.

Taken by Saga, in 2016 shows one of the agricultural project in Joe Slovo and incomplete houses.

In 2004, when the members of the CPA were preparing to implement phase two of the housing project – conducting beneficiary administration, dividing sites and preparing the community for development – the councillor opposed the initiative. His reason was that he wanted the development to be run by the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro municipality. He argued that the community would lose out on development provided by the municipality, as the community privately owned Joe Slovo. In the community people increasingly believed what the local councillor was saying. This was compounded by the fact that there was an increasing number of new residents in Joe Slovo, who did not understand the history of community organising through savings in Joe Slovo.

Joe Slovo CPA vs. Nelson Mandela Bay Metro Court Case

It was clear by 2005 that there had been a shift of power/influence in the settlement. As a result there was a growing voice demanding the handover of the Joe Slovo land to the municipality. This culminated in community dialogues that were initiated and facilitated by mediators employed by the municipality. A report conducted by the mediators concluded that the community approved that land should be given to the municipality in 2005. This statement, however, did not include the voices of the original founders of Joe Slovo and CPA members who refused to hand over land to the municipality. Additionally, members questioned the neutrality of the municipality-employed mediators.

Soon after the report was published the municipality requested hand over of the title deed, but some members of the CPA refused. Due to these events, the municipality took the refusing members to the Eastern Cape High Court in 2006. Accordingly, the CPA members required support and assistance from Legal Aid for representation. As Legal Aid advised the community, they prepared a memorandum detailing reasons for the refusal as well as a clear statement that members would only release the title deed for the sake of progress of development without letting go of their land.

The High Court welcomed the handing over of the title deed and ruled, however, that both the CPA and municipality would need to follow a process to hand over land. This would mean that CPA members must sign for de-registration of the CPA, however, this never took place. By the time the court case was closed, the councillor was appointed as chairperson of the CPA.

The Aftermath of the Court Case

The local ward councillor in Joe Slovo, as the chairperson of the CPA, further advocated for hand over of the land to the municipality. However, he was faced with a contradiction that made it difficult for him to sign for deregistration of the Joe Slovo CPA. The contradiction was that he was accepted and embraced by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform as someone who can sign on behalf of the CPA since he was a member of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro council.

Additionally, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform requested that if the Joe Slovo CPA elects a new committee it must not only have new members. The request was that the chairperson must add five more people to the top executive from the outgoing committee for continuation. But this was not done. It seemed the councillor was not interested in building the Joe Slovo CPA. 

Between 2005 and 2010 the Joe Slovo CPA did not convene any general meetings. This means that the community did not receive any formal feedback about the CPA. As a result, it became clear later that the local ward councillor did not succeed in deregistering the CPA as a result of the contradiction he was faced with. One can assume that the reason why there was no reporting back to the community by the local ward councillor/chairperson was because he did not want to tell people that he did not succeed in deregistering the CPA.

In 2009 it was evident that not everyone on the beneficiary list had received a house. As a result, FEDUP engaged with the Eastern Cape Department of Human Settlements and, via uTshani Fund, submitted an application for subsidies for beneficiaries on the housing list. Some members’ subsidies were never approved, as they needed an agreement of sale from the landowner. At this stage it was not clear to the community who owned Joe Slovo land, between CPA and Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, since there was never a community report back about the status the CPA.

Nevertheless, FEDUP approached the local ward councillor to seek assistance and clarity. The ward councillor replied by referring FEDUP to the municipality as the “owner” of the land. Based on the property register database of the municipality, FEDUP was told that the Joe Slovo land was never transferred to the municipality and that it is still owned by the CPA. Indeed, a copy of the original title deed received from the deeds office in Cape Town demonstrates that the land belongs to the CPA.

Governemental subsidy housing in Joe Slovo picture: saga

Governemental subsidy housing in Joe Slovo picture: Saga 2016

Uniting a Divided Community

Today in Joe Slovo there are people who have not received title deeds. Some never had a chance to receive houses and subsidies to build their houses. This is a direct consequence of conflicting and opposing interests in the Joe Slovo CPA, which are coined by two opposing parties, contesting the status of the Joe Slovo Community Property Association. Despite immense pressure to hand over the land to the municipality, the community was able to retain land ownership in Joe Slovo, which is legally registered under the Joe Slovo CPA.

The main problem in Joe Slovo today is political rather than legal. The question therefore is: How do you ensure that people are supported to access housing and title deeds? Today the community of Joe Slovo believes that this question can be answered by building a united community. Presently, there is a new ward councillor in Joe Slovo and this opens up new opportunities to support community led initiatives.

FEDUP is planning to conduct a community survey and the councilor is providing assistance. This community led survey will involve everyone who was a role player as a step to unite the community. It will show the houses that have been built and who built them. It will reveal who received the house, because some of the people living in these houses are not the owners. 

There is a case whereby provincial housing subsidies were approved and given to Thubeletsha Homes, which was a government-housing agency mandated to build low-cost housing. However, Thubeletsha Homes is no longer building houses and was taken over by the Housing Development Agency (HDA) due to being in “financial distress”. The community survey is the first step towards conducting a follow up on subsidies given to Thubeletsha Homes. The new ward councilor has arranged for the team from the office of the MEC of Human Settlements to provide some assistance in this regard.

Based on the meeting that was held between the community and officials from the office of the MEC of Human Settlements there was a general suggestion to request presidential intervention, since the community has engaged both local and provincial structures with limited success.

Conclusion

The Joe Slovo housing development project has existed for over 20 years. The experiences to date provide vital lessons especially in the current time, where the “land issue” is the most debated topic in South Africa. In the debate of amending laws the experience of FEDUP does not dispute the debate of legal instruments as impediment to access land/housing. However, FEDUPs experience contributes to the debate by demonstrating that there is a political layer which can be an impediment to accessing land/housing. This means that it is not enough to concentrate only on legal instruments and that there is a need to also understand the role of socio-political dynamics on the “land issue”.

Southern African Slum Dwellers Strategise Ahead of World Urban Forum 2018

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By Kwanda Lande (on behalf of CORC)

On 11 February 2018, the ninth World Urban Forum (WUF9) will take place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. WUF9 will have a specific thematic focus on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA). This theme of implementation is particularly important to urban poor residents and federation leaders of SDI’s Southern African countries, especially as the NUA relates to informal settlements. 

Twice a year, representatives of SDI‘s Southern African urban poor federations (Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Zambia) gather as a regional “hub” to strategise, report, share challenges, and plan for mutual learning. The recent Southern African SDI hub took place between 15 – 18 November 2017 in Johannesburg. Given the timing of the hub ahead of WUF9, the Federations invited Zou Kota-Fredricks, the South African Deputy Minister of Human Settlements, and Parks Tau, president of UCLGA* and SALGA** to open the hub and engage in discussions on the implementation of the NUA.

*United Cities and Local Governments

** South African Local Government Association

SAMSUNG CSCDelegates of the Southern Africa Hub welcoming the Deputy Minister of Human Settlement Zou Kota-Fredericks

The experience of Southern African slum dwellers working towards the New Urban Agenda (NUA)

In 2015, SDI was invited through an initiative called the General Assembly of Partners (GAP), to participate in the process leading up to Habitat III, in October 2017. GAP served as a broad-based deliberative platform for non-governmental partners to develop consensus for joined outcomes for Habitat III. The primary intention was for civil society organisations to influence UN member states that adopted the NUA at Habitat III. As a result urban poor federations in the SDI network used this opportunity to ensure that their voice was heard in the development of the NUA and that their experiences and aspirations were known and considered.

In the lead up to Habitat III, SDI’s East and Southern African federations had a strong presence at the UN Habitat III Thematic Meeting on Informal Settlements in Pretoria in April 2016. The meeting culminated in the Pretoria Declaration on Informal Settlements. SDI federations advocated that the NUA commit to

  • Supporting the self-organising processes of communities (such as data collection and learning exchanges) to partner effectively with governments and other urban actors
  • Using community-collected informal settlement data as the basis of collaborative informal settlement policy making and development planning.

How Southern African slum dwellers view the NUA

The NUA provides a new framework that lays out how cities should be planned and managed to best promote sustainable urbanisation. It talks about strengthening and creating inclusive partnerships, and people centred development. It suggests that the voice of community organisations be heard. However, for urban poor residents, the challenge, is establishing and maintaining partnerships especially at the level of municipalities where most of community organising activities are taking place and where development is expected to happen. This means that urban poor residents are struggling to gain recognition from municipal systems, and that they have not found ways of institutionalising local government – community partnerships in decision making and planning processes.

In Cape Town, for example, the South African SDI Alliance had established a strong partnership with the local municipality and jointly implemented several upgrading initiatives. However, since the last upgrading project in 2014, it has taken more than three years to progress to the next one. One of the contributing factors to this delays relate to the lack of hand-over of the partnership to successive heads of departments and senior project managers. The consequences of which is the loss of institutional memory and knowledge of the working partnership in a time of high staff turn-over within the municipality. 

SAMSUNG CSC

Parks Tau, speaking at the Southern Africa hub meeting during a discussion on the implementation of the NUA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In conversation with Parks Tau and Zou Kota-Fredericks, SDI’s Southern African federation members highlighted their priority of a NUA that is localised, meaning “that we want partnerships at a local government level”. An example is SDI’s partnership with UCLG on the Know Your City campaign, which promotes community-collected data on informal settlements as the basis for partnerships between slum dwellers and their local governments. The Southern African federations expressed:

we want to work – together with government, UCLG and private sector – on collecting data and using this information to participate in decision making, implementation, and monitoring the implementation of the NUA. For example, in South Africa we want to see the Department of Human Settlements creating a forum that will meet more regularly to monitor the implementation of the NUA. This forum should be inclusive to the level that ensures that poor communities are involved.

The fact that government and civil society are working in the same space of local government with similar vision of community development demands a partnership. Both Parks Tau and Zou Kota-Fredericks, agreed for a local forum- South African forum. Parks also suggested for a Southern Africa forum that will sure case a partnership of government and civil society at that level.

At the start of 2018, before the World Urban Forum, we have to work together to convene a meeting to discuss a way forward on how we are going to work together and also to prepare a case study to present at the WUF9. The know your city campaign – data collection by communities is one tool that we are going to use to hold and strengthen our partnership. This will also be an opportunity for all partners to raise their expectations from this partnership. Parks Tau

The state of local government partnerships in some countries in the Southern Africa region

Southern African SDI federations spoke about the state of partnerships between themselves and their local governments as a way of offering some learning points on how to implement the NUA. Some of SDI’s federations have managed to establish well functioning partnerships: In Botswana, the partnership between the local government of Francistown and the Botswana Homeless and Poor People’s Federation involves community members and government collectively collecting community data, identifying and implementing projects. This has allowed the Botswana federation to conduct profiling and enumeration in Francsitown (Somerset West and Somerset East), identify and implement infrastructure projects together with local authorities. A major contributing factor to this work has been the presence of officials on the ground, working hand in hand with federation members around data collection.

In Namibia, slum dwellers have managed to establish local government partnerships with municipalities such as Gobabis where the Shack Dwellers federation of Namibia signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the local authority for upgrading Freedom Square informal settlement. This resulted in the Ministry of Rural Development contributing N$ 8 million and Gobabis local municipality contributing technical expertise. Officials of Gobabis municipality worked with the community of Freedom Square in data collection, community planning and implementation of different upgrading phases. In this project officials made sure that they were always on the ground. As a result they were quick to respond to projects issues. They did not impose solutions or approaches to solving problems but instead provided the necessary support for slum dwellers to implement their plans.

SAMSUNG CSCDelegates of the Southern Africa region hub meeting representing Urban poor federations form Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Swaziland, South Africa, Zambia, and  Zimbabwe.

What are the main priorities of the Southern African federations ahead of WUF9?

The WUF9 presents an opportunity for urban poor federations of the Southern Africa region to influence how the NUA is implemented.  The primary priority for federations in the Southern Africa regions include localised partnerships that are based on community-collected data. The Southern African federations want to work with government and civil society organisations on collecting informal settlement data and using it to participate in decision making, implementation, and to monitor the implementation of the NUA.

How Lesotho is building an organised, urban poor movement

By FEDUP No Comments

“Saving is our heartbeat”, any member of South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor (FEDUP) will tell you. “This is how we organise, how we build trust, open spaces to talk and share, find ways to support each other and change our lives. We don’t collect money, we collect people.” Over the last twenty five years the South African federation has grown from a handful of savings groups in the North West and Kwa Zulu Natal Provinces to 626 savings groups in eight provinces with 43 999 members.

Lesotho federation and Tshwarellang saving scheme members (Free State) after mobilising new savers

Lesotho federation and Tshwarellang saving scheme members (Free State) after mobilising new savers

What does it look like when savings groups multiply, and federate within their cities – how does an urban poor, country-wide federation emerge? Through horizontal learning exchanges, South Africa’s FEDUP has been supporting emerging savings groups in Lesotho to do just that. Within the SDI network, the definition of an “emerging” federation is a group that has started building savings collectives but has not yet federated nor achieved citywide scale and is yet to develop a critical engagement with state institutions and other development actors.

As a tool for building strong and organised movements of the urban poor, exchange visits between federations, enable savers to “learn by doing”. In particular, the exchange visits from Lesotho to South Africa have focused on strengthening the foundational aspects of a saving scheme. These included opening a new savings scheme and mobilising members, how to collect and record daily savings, how to engage local government authorities and how to facilitate a network meeting, in which several savings scheme in a region come together to report, organise and support each other.

Manana (left) and Nthabiseng (right) display their bedding (income generation) project for Tshwarellang saving scheme in Free State during the exchange.

Manana (left) and Nthabiseng (right) display their bedding (income generation) project for Tshwarellang saving scheme in Free State during the exchange.

Some of the challenges experienced by Lesotho Federation members included poor recording of savings books, complications with opening bank accounts, and challenges with compiling savings and project information from all districts. These were the focus of Lesotho’s last exchange to Free State province in South Africa in September 2016.

During a door-to-door, daily savings collection, Lesotho federation members shared:

“I realised that the daily collection was not just about collecting money from the members but also checking on their well-being. Some savers didn’t attend meetings because Elizabeth’s husband was seriously ill, Ntswaki just delivered a baby, Sero is not well in health and Dweni’s husband is in hospital. The groups then decided to make financial contributions other than daily savings to help with transport to hospital or medication.”

Federation members singing during the evaluation meeting of the exchange

Federation members singing during the evaluation meeting of the exchange

So how do savings groups multiply and federate? Through “learning by doing” as reflected in comments by Lesotho federation members at the end of the exchange:

The mobilisation experience taught us that we can approach totally random communities for saving scheme establishment.

We learnt about saving networks and their importance and that is something we do not have in Lesotho.

We saw that feedback to members on activities such as collection of money is crucial as it enhances transparency.

We realised your love for the organisation because some of you have even reached the stage of getting houses, but you are still active members and that shows us that you were not chasing after houses.

Jemina Nkoni (left) and Malefu Semonye (right) received a certificate and trophy for the third best performing saving network in the Free State

Jemina Nkoni (left) and Malefu Semonye (right) received a certificate and trophy for the third best performing saving network in the Free State

Seeing from the South: an international exchange with South African shelter activists

By CORC, FEDUP, ISN, Learning Exchanges, SDI No Comments

By Dan Silver, Diana Mitlin and Sophie King (crossposted from the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester)

“We are poor, but we are not hopeless. We know what we are doing”.

This is Alinah Mofokeng, one of three activists from the South African alliance of community organizations and support NGOs affiliated to Shack / Slum Dwellers International (SDI) who came to visit Manchester last month. The three came to explain their approaches and to exchange knowledge with local organisations through a combination of visits around Manchester and Salford, and a half-day workshop drawing together activists from around the country.

While South Africa and the UK might initially appear to be worlds apart, previous discussions between low-income communities in the global North and South had identified commonalities in their disadvantage. Potentially there are approaches that can be drawn upon and adapted in order to resist marginalisation and improve local communities, which can work across different places and contexts. This was the basis for Sophie King (UPRISE Research Fellow) and Professor Diana Mitlin (Global Development Institute, University of Manchester) inviting the South African Alliance to meet with UK community groups in March, drawing on a long history of community exchanges. This coincided with the Alliance participating in the Global Development Institute’s teaching programme with community leaders lecturing on their experiences and methods.

Alinah Mofokeng (Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor), Nkokheli Ncambele (Informal Settlements Network) and Charlton Ziervogel (CORC) all talked about their experiences of being part of the South African Alliance of SDI. This alliance has pioneered people-centered development initiatives by and of people in poverty since 1991. Their foundations are established in the grassroots, working on issues that emerge from the daily experiences of poverty, landlessness, and homelessness to bring immediate improvements and long-term inclusive citizenship within cities.

SDI’s approach to organizing is grounded in women’s led savings schemes, in which each member saves small amounts and does so with the support of their own collective savings group, so they are able to improve their own lives, and that of the wider community also. Solidarity is central to their approach and savings schemes are encouraged to federate to have stronger influence on city and state government. In the process of coming together they learn about their respective needs and challenges and respond collectively. If one member’s family does not have enough to eat, the group may decide that week’s savings will be spent on putting bread on their table. Once one savings scheme is formed, they share their learning with other marginalised people around them and support others to form schemes of their own that can join the network.

This extends beyond initial collectives to direct community-to-community learning exchange at city, national, and international levels. From here, they are able to show that they are together and are capable, which means they can influence the government from a more powerful basis – as Nkokheli said, they have been able to say to the politicians: “you are eating our money and not doing what we want. We say, enough is enough!” Nkokheli said that once the community shows that they are capable, for example through building their own toilets in the informal settlements and developing savings, politicians are more likely to listen.

The exchange of different ways of doing things between the South African Alliance and UK organisations certainly had an impact – showing us that the exchange of ideas about solidarity, a self-reliant ethos, and having a long-term vision for more inclusive cities is powerful enough to make sense across continents. One of the participants in the meeting was Ann from a group called Five Mummies Make, which is a self-help group in Scotland who have come together to sell handmade crafts, put on events and contribute to local charities; through meeting every week, the women have improved their own well-being in the process.

After the workshop, Ann was inspired to make a bigger difference than they were already achieving, saying that:

“If we bring together a bigger group, a federation, we can make such a bigger difference within the community, so not just small differences for individuals…I want to go back now and make the changes in the community, without having to go cap in hand asking for help constantly, but saying – this is what we want…”

Alinah, Nkokheli, and Charlton visited the United Estates of Wythenshawe for an extended lunch to meet people involved in Mums’ Mart. Mums’ Mart was started by a group of parents who came together after speaking to each other in the playground at their children’s school in Wythenshawe. Through chatting, they realised that they shared experiences of feeling isolated, and that their kids weren’t getting to take part in everyday activities. To address these problems the mums now meet every other week to have a meal while their children play, and they organise ‘market days’ to bring people from the estate together and raise money to take their families away somewhere fun for a day or a week.

After the exchange, members of Mum’s Mart have begun to emulate the SDI savings model and are holding weekly savings meetings, alongside their income-generating activities and monthly committee meetings to review progress; they also have ambitions about how over the long-term they can bring practical social change beyond their immediate group.  Sharon Davies, the group’s treasurer, told us that since the visit Mums’ Mart have set up their own savings scheme and it is going well, and that they “have loads of really good ideas as to where we are going to go with Mums’ Mart from now on”.

This was certainly not just a one-way street of learning from the SDI approach. Nkokheli, who was initially surprised that poverty existed in the UK after visiting a homeless group in Manchester, told us that: “The exchanges are very important to us, because it mobilises the community…and also [helps] to train communities to do things, [to see] what other people are doing for themselves. Here in Manchester, I learnt a lot…The systems are not the same, but the look of things are the same – there are things we can learn from Manchester, and there are things Manchester can learn from us”.

Through this exchange then, there have been concrete changes that have already taken place. It also shows the value of bringing together groups who might be marginalised from politics and from economic opportunities, to share ideas, tactics and strategies. There is most certainly scope in the UK to build on the approach that SDI take: developing a more self-reliant social action approach; coming together, initially in close supportive relationships between neighbours, but with a view to wider solidarity across groups and between areas; and showing the government through practical activities the capabilities of people living in low-income areas and the direction that poverty reduction strategies should take.

As Alinah said, “we are not hopeless. We know what we are doing”.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/164289875[/vimeo]

Reflections on H3 Pretoria: Can we Implement Progressive Outcomes?

By CORC, ISN, SDI No Comments

by Ava Rose Hoffman, Yolande Hendler and Skye Dobson (on behalf of CORC)

From 7-8 April 2016, the SA SDI Alliance together with Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) participated in the United Nations Habitat III Thematic Conference on Informal Settlements in Pretoria, advocating for the inclusion of  the voices of the urban poor in crafting the “New Urban Agenda” (NUA).

SDI Team

SDI Team

The Problem of Mass Housing, The Potential of Informal Settlements

In his opening address, Dr. Joan Clos, emphasised that informal settlements and housing should be “put at the centre” politically and physically. Mass housing projects on the periphery of cities would need to be diminished because without economic activity and mixed (land) use they become dormitory neighbourhoods for the poor. Clos suggested that urbanisation needed to be used as a tool for socio-economic development through well-planned and managed cities, proposing that the following three dimensions of urbanisation need to be considered:

  • The Legal Dimension (requiring new rules and regulations)
  • The Physical Dimension (spatial planning and land use)
  • The Financial Dimension (enabling economic design and finance)

While Clos noted that each dimension requires strategic instruments to address the “proliferation of slum dwellers”, we wonder where the “Social Dimension” featured in this discussion. The absence of shack dwellers as central agents and decision makers in planning, implementation and access to finance produces limited and brittle results. The South African Minister of Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, alluded to this effect: “We [the Department of Human Settlements] experienced challenges from time to time because we did not always understand the environment we were going in to. We are looking to adjust this legislation.” Whereas adjusted legislation carries some impact, the underlying value lies within the experience that informs strategic contributions of slum dwellers themselves.

Opening address by Joan Clos, Executive Director of UN Habitat

Opening address by Joan Clos, Executive Director of UN Habitat

Where Planning Falls Short…

However, what purpose do master plans render if they are not implemented? And, how do we rethink the relationship between living spaces and workplaces? In a panel on the role of urban planning and land use, Julian Baskin (Head of Program Unit at Cities Alliance) emphasised that the urban agenda was not only about housing but how we access cities and livelihoods. Slum dwellers are no longer waiting for government, Baskin explained, but are organising themselves, forming their own plans and collecting their own data.

Slum dwellers are arriving at local governments around secondary cities saying, ‘We have our own information, partner with us’. When you have people in communities who understand plans and how to control their own development, you suddenly gain multiple planners….National governments need to build enabling legislation for cities, between local governments and communities, so that planning can be transferred to slum dwellers themselves.

Informal Settlements: Productive Centres for Resident Organising and Livelihoods

In two side events, community leaders affiliated to SDI spoke of the connection between informal settlements, livelihoods and mobilisation strategies through savings and data collection. The conversation was grounded by the very personal account of Catherine, a young mother from Johannesburg who spoke of her experience as a waste picker and recycler. In a soft, and, at moments, shaky voice, she recounted,

“I am a waste picker because this is how I support my children. This is how my mother supported us. I mainly work with cardboard and scale it every day. For 1Kg I am paid 90c.”

Catherine

Catherine

Based on Catherine’s account and a further presentation by SDI partner movement, Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO), it was evident that daily life in informal settlements significantly co-exists and intersects with livelihood activities such as waste picking, street vending and home based work. Therefore,

  • Informal settlements are spaces of productivity and economic activity: homes are productive assets that contribute to economic livelihoods.
  • Basic services are inputs for informal workers’ productivity and function as a direct link to livelihoods.
  • Informal settlements are intricately connected to economic migrants and livelihood opportunities.

Rose Molokoane, Coordinator of FEDUP and Deputy President of SDI spoke about the broader involvement and mobilisation of shack dwellers in global discussions on development:

“As informal settlers we ask ourselves, what was achieved by the MDGs discussed twenty years ago ? Will the SDGs really attend to the needs of poor people in informal settlements? People who are planning for us without us are making a mistake. Informal settlements keep growing because most of the time we are taken as the subject of discussion without including us in the discussion… We use the power of savings and information about our informal settlements to organise ourselves, to reach out to our communities, to do something and to allow government to meet us half way” (Rose Molokoane, SDI & SA SDI Alliance)

Victoria Okoye (WIEGO) and Rose Molokoane on the left,

Victoria Okoye (WIEGO) and Rose Molokoane on the left,

As a collective of global movements, WIEGO, SDI and the Huairou Commission seek to ensure that the NUA promotes inclusion and produces equitable social and economic outcomes. Some of these include:

  • Recognition of all forms of work, both informal and formal
  • Greater access to affordable financial services, training new technologies and decent and secure workplaces for all women and men
  • Adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services
  • Security of tenure for the urban poor and a stop to all forced evictions

Know Your City: Community Collected Data for Collaborative City Planning

With panelists clad in Know Your City T-shirts and the presentation of a KnowYourCity explanatory video set to an upbeat soundtrack, the mood was set for a different kind of panel. Thus far, the voices of informal settlement dwellers had been sparse in the conference. That was, until the Know Your City side event.

SDI’s Know Your City (KYC) campaign emphasises that the “data revolution” is central to the New Urban Agenda (NUA). It constitutes a true data revolution as shack dwellers are organised across the Global South not only to gather invaluable data on informal settlements, but to use it as the foundation for partnerships and collaborative urban planning. While “partnerships” between communities and government are widely accepted as critical to the success of the NUA, the mechanisms for actually realising productive partnerships are poorly understood. The KYC campaign has proven a highly effective strategy for catalysing such partnership and sustained dialogue between communities and government.

Mzwanele Zulu and Joyce Lungu, community leaders of urban poor federations in South Africa and Zambia, spoke of their experience profiling, enumerating and mapping their cities. Joyce spoke of the Zambian federation’s work to profile Lusaka through the strong organisational capacity in slum dweller communities. While the challenge for non-residents concerned entering and gathering reliable data, the power this information constituted for residents was evident when it was shared with government partners in the city council to identify incremental upgrading of settlements through prioritising needs and projects.

Mzwanele Zulu appreciated the large audience at the event, but gave an impassioned plea for more government officials to make the effort to attend the panels of informal dwellers. He highlighted the critical role of household level enumerations in organising his community in Joe Slovo, Cape Town.  Initially, the government claimed there were too many shack dwellers to accommodate in the planned upgrade and advised on relocations to the outskirts of the city. The enumeration revealed the actual population to be far smaller and negotiations with government resulted in an agreement to undertake an in situ development. The enumeration data was also vital to the beneficiary registration process – something often mismanaged in upgrading projects, often at the expense of the poorest residents.

SAMSUNG CSC

Joyce Lungu, Zambian Federation Leader

Julian Baskin (of Cities Alliance) reminded the audience that a tremendous change is required to create an environment that catalyses the efforts of the urban poor to improve their communities instead of simply “controlling” urban poor communities. He applauded the efforts of organised slum dweller communities in SDI to gather critical data, plan for settlement improvements and seek partnerships with government. To meet the demand of informal settlement upgrading in the Global South, partnerships that bring the efforts of a billion slum dwellers to the service of city development will be essential.

CORC Deputy Director, Charlton Ziervogel, wrapped up the discussion by explaining the process undertaken by the SDI network to standardise profiling data. Such standardisation makes it possible to aggregate data at the regional and global level which is currently hosted on SDI’s Know Your City online platform. In South Africa, FEDUP and the Informal Settlement Network (ISN) are working on two government tenders to gather data on hundreds of informal settlements in the Western Cape. Affiliates in Uganda and Kenya are making similar progress. These cases serve as powerful examples of authentic government partnership and a data revolution that chooses communities over consultants to gather data and serve as the foundation for inclusive, collaborative planning.

SAMSUNG CSC

Know Your City Side Event

How Can we Implement Progressive Outcomes? 

The two day thematic meeting ended with the adoption of the Pretoria Declaration on Informal Settlements, which is considered as official input on informal settlements to the New Urban Agenda. UN Habitat also launched its “Up for Slum Dwellers – Transforming a Billion Lives’ campaign, hosted by UN Habitat’s Participatory Slum Upgrading Program (PSUP) and the World Urban Campaign with the aim to bring about a new paradigm regarding global responses to slum upgrading.

In its current version, the Pretoria Declaration presents progressive and people-centred recommendations that relate to embracing the importance of in-situ participatory slum upgrading approaches, pursuing a focus on people-centred partnerships as suggested by “People-Public-Private Partnerships”, using participatory and inclusive approaches to developing policy, strengthening the role of local government and recognising civil society as a key actor in participatory processes. The Declaration also emphasises that the NUA should be action-oriented and implementable.

Although the declaration indicates that action should be concentrated at the local government level and that UN Habitat support to states occurs through tools such as the PSUP (See Point 9 in the Declaration), “the how” remains a strong concern for members of the South African SDI Alliance, and SDI network. While the SDI network and “Know Your City” approach was characterised by a strong presence and the message of “plan with us, not for us” was well received the mechanisms for implementation remain unclear:

“We have this beautiful constitution, but how will South African municipalities act? Politicians and officials talk very nicely – I hope that they will open doors for us when we engage them. Since I joined ISN in 2009 we are battling to sign Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with municipalities for upgrading. We only have the MoU with the City of Cape Town and eight provincial agreements with national government, but those are for the People’s Housing Process and not for upgrading. Do we know what is really happening on the ground or are we just becoming advocates of theory?” (Mzwanele Zulu, SA SDI Alliance)

“The highlight for me was making sure that our voices and messages were heard. Part of my concern was when I looked at the expenses of this event. There are a lot of people who don’t have and here is our government spending so much money on this event. But when you go and ask them to assist poor people you don’t get that response” (Melanie Manuel, SA SDI Alliance)

Watch Rose Molokoane’s input to the NUA on behalf of SDI here.

The Pretoria Declaration on Informal Settlements: Perspectives from the urban poor

By News, SDI No Comments

On 8 April 2016, SDI leader Rose Molokoane delivered an address on the New Urban Agenda at the final plenary session of the UN Habitat III Thematic Meeting on Informal Settlements in Pretoria. The thematic meeting took place in preparation for the upcoming UN Habitat III Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development, to be held in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016.

The plenary session in which Rose spoke was entitled: “Together transforming a billion lives: Participatory approaches in planning, implementing, and monitoring informal settlement/slum upgrading.”

Watch the speech here:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/163418761[/vimeo]

As a founding leader of the Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a network of slum dweller federations spanning 38 countries, I understand the critical need for increased focus on informal settlements in the urban agenda as this is where close to a billion of our brothers and sisters live. We’re not the subjects of this discussion. We are part of this discussion.

As chair of the Grassroots Constituency Group of the General Assembly of Partners, representing slum dwellers, informal workers, organised youth and marginalised women in our cities, I am very pleased to take part in this Thematic Meeting on Informal Settlements towards Habitat III and the New Urban Agenda. This is OUR agenda. I only wish this whole venue was full of slum dwellers.

We call for specific mention in the New Urban Agenda of the urgent need to combat the spatial, social and economic exclusion of informal settlements and the informal sector in cities and to mobilise the requisite resources to address this.

This will require a New Urban Agenda that commits itself to support the process of organizing communities to partner effectively with governments and other urban actors. We must find ways of institutionalising these partnerships in the decision making and planning process. Do you Know Your City? This should be the question we ask our communities, our politicians and our technocrats.

We urge partners to recognise the role informal settlement dwellers must play in the implementation of scalable efforts to build urban resilience and promote climate change mitigation and adaptation at the local level.

Effective implementation of the New Urban Agenda demands robust partnerships between local governments and organised communities of the urban poor. These must be at the core of policy making and development planning and implementation in cities and stress the need to strengthen existing cooperation mechanisms, platforms, and partnership arrangements.

Community-collected slum data should form the basis of collaborative informal settlement policy making and development planning, and is a critical tool to implement, monitor and evaluate the SDGs in cities across the globe. When organised informal settlement dwellers gather these data, they become active and organised citizens with the capacity to engage in action-oriented partnerships.

We are going to change this world by hook or by crook.

In solidarity,

Rose Molokoane, SDI
Chair
Grassroots Constituency Group
General Assembly of Partners

 

Alliance mobilises street dwellers & teaches students in Manchester, UK

By CORC, FEDUP, ISN 2 Comments

By Ava Rose Hoffman (on behalf of CORC)

From 8-12 March 2016, the South African SDI Alliance participated in a learning exchange in the United Kingdom with students at the University of Manchester and community organisations in the Greater Manchester area.

Left to right: Charlton Ziervogel (CORC), Alina Mofokeng (FEDUP), Nkokheli Ncambele (ISN) in Manchester

Left to right: Charlton Ziervogel (CORC), Alina Mofokeng (FEDUP), Nkokheli Ncambele (ISN)

Members of the of the South African SDI Alliance, community leaders Nkokheli Ncambele (ISN), Alina Mofokeng (FEDUP) and support professional Charlton Ziervogel (CORC) engaged with postgraduate students at the University of Manchester’s School of Environment, Education and Development participating in a course on Citizen-Led Development. In the course, students study inclusive, pro-poor, participatory community development approaches. The course highlighted methodologies practiced by SDI and collaborating organisations including developing savings schemes, federation building, community mobilisation, enumerations, engaging with the state, and building partnerships with NGOs, academic institutions and governments.

Arriving in Manchester as Community Lecturers

During the week of lectures at the University of Manchester, Nkokheli and Alina taught students about the ways in which the urban poor in South Africa are uniting, mobilising, organising themselves around savings contributions and building partnerships with local governments and institutions.

Reflecting on the experience of teaching students in the course, Nkokheli described the importance of public participation when professionals engage with communities:

“The professional likes to ‘do’ for poor people. That’s the first challenge. It’s a challenge on both sides because communities don’t want someone to decide on their behalf, and the government doesn’t want to listen to poor people because they say that they’re uneducated. That’s why we always try to change that mindset… It’s important to come to the people and listen to what they want. You use your professionalism to help them to achieve what they want.”

Nkokheli facilitates a community gathering with informal settlement leaders in Khayelitsha's Site B

Nkokheli facilitates a community gathering with informal settlement leaders in Khayelitsha’s Site B

Mobilising Manchester Street Dwellers & Community Movements

In addition to lecturing the students, Nkokheli, Alina and Charlton visited community groups each day, ranging from homeless support organizations to squatters occupying empty buildings to women’s income generation groups. Additionally, they participated in a half-day workshop with local community groups on 8 March 2016.

Meeting with community group Moms Mart in Wythenshawe

Meeting with community group Mums Mart in Wythenshawe

During the visits, Nkokheli and Alina described how they personally came to be involved in their respective movements, ISN and FEDUP, and then proceeded to discuss how to self-organise and start savings contribution programmes. Upon learning about how savings schemes operate in South Africa, some community organisations were receptive to the idea of starting similar savings groups of their own.

While many of the challenges that organisations and movements face in the UK are different from those encountered in the South African context, Charlton described that “what these groups needed was people to inspire them to get organised.” Referring to a past exchange with SDI back in the 1990s, Frances, a leader from one participating group, the Teeside Homeless Action Group (THAG), articulated:

“Our contact with groups from South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, etc. helped THAG to develop ways of working that matched our ethos of self-help and user involvement.  One person I spoke to on a number of occasions was Sheela Patel (SPARC, India) who liked the way THAG was working but she warned that unless we were careful we would attract large scale funding, end up with offices full of technology and lots of staff but would lose touch with our reason for existence – helping homeless people. Her warning went unheeded and it was not until 2010 that I saw what THAG had become – offices, technology, lots of staff but I had no contact with the homeless.  Since that time THAG has offloaded staff got rid of electronic gadgetry and went back to the things we did best – work with the homeless and help them to help themselves.”

This example, Charlton described, captures the richness of the network’s knowledge.

Nkokheli with fellow ISN coordinators and Provincial Minister for Human Settlements in Cape Town

Nkokheli with fellow ISN coordinators and Provincial Minister for Human Settlements in Cape Town

Furthermore, Nkokheli highlighted the importance of building solidarity, not only by creating networks among the poor but also by forming partnerships with local governments and institutions (including universities). Nkokheli described,

“By forming partnerships with other institutions, it makes government listen to the people.”

In particular, Nkokheli saw a great deal of potential for low-income communities to build partnerships with the government in Manchester given that the government issues small grants to the unemployed, which could serve as the foundation for a savings contribution programme. Nonetheless, Charlton observed that funding is limited and many people are falling into poverty in Manchester, thus to to “get ahead” it’s critical for people to organise themselves.

Reflections on Teaching and Mobilising

Charlton described that it was very significant to expose students to a different type of urban planning process given that “the opportunity to influence future urban planning has always been something that we try to achieve through CORC.”

Alina speaks to fellow FEDUP members during savings mobilisation

Alina speaks to fellow FEDUP members during savings mobilisation

Nkokheli emphasized the key message that ISN and FEDUP sought to bring to community groups in Manchester:

“The people need to network, to discuss the issues, to make sure that they’re initiating projects and also forming partnerships with the government. This was the message that we wanted to send to the people in Manchester.”

The two primary points of action that Nkokheli sought to reinforce were

  1. community organising in order to project the voices of the urban poor, and
  2. developing savings schemes.

Nkokheli described:

“What we tried to convey in Manchester is that poor people mustn’t tell themselves that they are poor and they can’t do anything. So, they need to start collecting information and organising people, making sure that they are saving so that when they go to the government, they go with something. We are trying to change the system of ‘taking’ to a system of ‘supporting.’”

How High-Tech Maps Could Help Urban Slums Plan Better Streets

By CORC, SDI No Comments

By Laura Bliss and Aarian Marshall (Cross-posted from CityLab)

In this Jan. 29, 2016 photo, Tainara Lourenco, who's five months pregnant, stands outside her stilt home that stands over polluted water in a slum in Recife, Brazil. Lourenco became pregnant at a scary moment — the dawn of an extraordinary Zika outbreak, as authorities came to suspect that the virus was causing an alarming spike in a rare birth defect called microcephaly. "If you have to get sick you will get sick," she said. "It's everywhere." (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

In this Jan. 29, 2016 photo, Tainara Lourenco, who’s five months pregnant, stands outside her stilt home that stands over polluted water in a slum in Recife, Brazil. Lourenco became pregnant at a scary moment — the dawn of an extraordinary Zika outbreak, as authorities came to suspect that the virus was causing an alarming spike in a rare birth defect called microcephaly. “If you have to get sick you will get sick,” she said. “It’s everywhere.” (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

In slums, buildings are often so densely packed that many are cut off from streets and pathways. This creates a literal roadblock to much-needed public resources.

“In South Africa, governments will often say that informal settlements are too dense to install adequate services,” Charlton Ziervogel, deputy director at the Community Organisation Resource Centre, a Cape Town-based slum advocacy and support NGO, tells CityLab. “So you’ll find municipalities that install toilets, but only at the edge of a settlement, because they perceive that there is no space inside.”

It’s a serious matter. Across the global south, hundreds of millions live in slums lacking piped water, proper drainage, and sanitation—ideal breeding grounds for virus-carrying insects and other types of disease. To fight epidemics such as Zika, experts warn, living conditions for the urban poor must be improved. But to do so, many slum communities first need to open up space.

A new tool might help. Open Reblock is a free, open-source platform designed to simplify the process of thoughtfully reorganizing slum communities. Funded through OpenIDEO, it’s the product of a major research collaboration by the Santa Fe Institute, Sam Houston State University,UC Berkeley, and Shack/Slum Dwellers International, a global network of community-based organisations representing the urban poor.

The only input that’s required for Open Reblock is a good-quality map with details on each property inside a community and its access to the street network. The tool uses an algorithm to identify the least disruptive reorganization of a cluster of slum blocks so that each parcel gets access to the street—nudging this house two meters east, extending that road a few meters south. It produces a new map of this “reblocked” community, which residents can adjust to their needs and use to push local government (or other support sources) to begin construction.

“How to change the physical slum? You tap into the knowledge of the people who live in the slum,” says José Lobo, an economist and sustainability researcher with Arizona State University who has worked on the project. The tool, he says, captures that knowledge—physically, on a map—so it “can be shared, examined, revisited, and acted on while minimizing disruption.” Indeedthe philosophy behind the tool is that no one is better positioned to help plan a community than those who actually live in it and have the social knowledge to understand how people need to move around their neighborhoods. In other words: This thing will be very useful in community meetings.

In its simplest terms, reblocking has been going on as long as there have been slums—“It’s just playing around with space,” says Ziervogel. In the past decade, organizations like his, operating under Shack/Slum Dwellers International, have worked with slum communities around the world on formal reblocking efforts using hand-drawn maps—translated into design software—to gradually improve street plans.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/103700821[/vimeo]

Last year, Flamingo Crescent, an informal settlement outside Cape Town, completed reblocking and installing water, sanitation, and electricity for all of its 104 households. It took nearly three years to get there, and for good reason: Neighbors had to negotiate inherently sensitive changes to their properties, and the community had to work with NGOs and local government align the plan with municipal expectations. Technology will hopefully speed up this process.

“In a lot of formal urban planning, the question is, ‘How do we solve the slums problem?’” says Christa Brelsford, a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. “The conception is that this is too hard, that the only way is to start over from scratch. People who live in slums don’t agree with that assessment, and don’t want to be resettled.”

The researchers are very clear on what the Open Reblock tool will not do: command community members to raze their houses and rearrange them into straight, neat grids. The source code favors pathways that do not get in the way of existing homes or neighborhood fixtures, which means they sometimes turn out a bit wiggly. And the physical construction process is meant to be gradual, with community members working with government to upgrade clusters of blocks at a time.

The graphic below depicts a sample re-blocking project in the Epworth neighborhood of Harare, Zimbabwe. The far left shows the area before reblocking, with streets in black and properties without street access highlighted in orange. Properties with access are surrounded by dotted gray lines. In the middle is an image of the same neighborhood in the midst of reblocking, with just four properties left still isolated from road access. On the far right is the neighborhood after reblocking: All parcels now have access to the street.

A sample reblocking project in the Epworth neighborhood of Harare, Zimbabwe. (Open Reblock)

A sample reblocking project in the Epworth neighborhood of Harare, Zimbabwe. (Open Reblock)

Eventually, researchers say, the tool will be available both on and offline. They expect to finish the prototype within three months. Meanwhile, Brelsford will travel with other research team members to Nairobi, to learn more about slums from a design perspective. Eventually, SDI will select a community in South Africa in which to first use Open Reblock.

While the tool’s potential for streamlining reblocking is great, it’s not a silver bullet. “There’s a specific social process that needs to be part of the solution,” Ziervogel says. “Technical solutions cannot be simply dumped on a community. They need to be involved in shaping and leading the process.” Tools like Open Reblock wouldn’t even exist, he adds, without the foundation work of community-driven organizations like SDI and its many affiliates on the ground.

“One of the things that is defining of SDI’s work is helping communities put themselves on the map,” Lobo says. He describes the power and attention slums can draw—from governments, from government services, from other people who live in the city—by creating a way to point to the places where people work and live. “That simple map is an issue of great contention between slum dwellers and the powers that be. [They say,] ‘We are making ourselves visible.’ They want to and need to tell the authorities where they live.”