Slums and housing in Africa: the challenge of slums: global report on human settlements 2003 published by Earthscan Publications Ltd., for and on behalf of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme - UN-Habitat - The Chronicle Library Shelf

UN Chronicle, Dec, 2003 by Rasna Warah

If you think that Africa's problems are mainly rural, think again. According to a UN-Habitat publication launched on World Habitat Day (6 October), sub-Saharan Africa hosts the largest proportion of the urban population residing in slums (71.9 percent); 166 minion out of a total urban population of 231 million are classified as slum dwellers. The region has the second largest slum population in the world after South-central Asia, which has 262 million, making up 58 per cent of the global urban population. UN-Habitat estimates that 924 million people worldwide, or 31.6 per cent of the global urban population, lived in slums in 2001 In the next thirty years, this figure is projected to double to almost 2 billion, unless substantial policy changes are put in place.

And what exactly is a slum? UN-HABITAT attempts at a definition by describing a slum household as "a group of individuals living under the same roof that lack one or more of the following conditions: access to sale water; access to sanitation; secure tenure; durability of housing; and sufficient living area".

The UN-Habitat report, "The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003", shows that slum life often entails enduring some of the most intolerable housing conditions, which frequently include sharing toilets with hundreds of people, living in overcrowded and insecure neighbourhoods, and constantly facing the threat of eviction Slum dwellers are also more likely to contract water-borne diseases, such as cholera and typhoid, as well as opportunistic ones that accompany HIV/AIDS Slum life, therefore, places enormous social and psychological burdens on residents. which often leads to broken homes and social exclusion. Although the common perception is that slums are breeding grounds for crime, the report shows that slum dwellers, in fact, are more often victims than perpetrators of crime.

While slums in any city are not a desirable policy objective, the report shows that their existence in many cities can have unintended benefits. For instance, they are often the first stopping point for rural-to-urban migrants; they provide low-cost affordable housing that enables the new migrants to save enough money for their eventual absorption into urban society. Slums also keep the wheels of many cities turning.

The majority of slum dwellers earn their living in informal but crucial activities, and therefore provide services that may not be so easily available through the formal sector. Many cities and industries would simply come to a halt without the labour provided by these dwellers. As Nairobi's art and music scene will attest, slums are also vibrant places where the mixing of different cultures often produces new forms of artistic expression. These unhealthy, crowded environments can sow the seeds of new cultural movements and levels of solidarity unknown among the middle and upper classes.

However, as Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka of UN-Habitat states, these few positive attributes do not in any way justify the continued existence of slums and should not be an excuse for the slow progress towards the goal of adequate shelter for all, She admits that many past responses to the problem of slums have been based on the erroneous belief that provision of improved housing and related services, through slum upgrading, and physical eradication will, on their own, solve the problem. Solutions based on this premise have failed to address the main underlying causes of slums, of which poverty is the most significant. The report therefore emphasizes that policies should more vigorously address the issue of the livelihoods of slum dwellers and the urban poor in general, thus going beyond traditional approaches that have tended to concentrate on improvement of housing, infrastructure and physical environmental conditions. This means enabling urban informal activities to flourish, linking low-income housing development to income generation, and ensuring easy access to jobs through pro-poor transport and low-income settlement location policies.

Although there is growing recognition worldwide of the need to address the slum question, as manifested in the recent United Nations Millennium Declaration, which aims to significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020, the report notes that there is still a general apathy and lack of political will among Governments to implement policies aimed at improving their living conditions. It is clear that slum formation is closely linked to economic cycles, trends in national income distribution and, in more recent years, to national economic development policies. But policy failure at all levels--international, national and local--has had the net effect of weakening the capacity of national governments to improve housing and living conditions of low-income groups.

Lessons from several countries underscore the importance and fundamental role of sustained political will and commitment to improving or reducing slums. For instance, some countries in Latin America have implemented wholesale tenure regularization programmes, which have significantly reduced the number of squatter households. South Africa's national housing programme may not be perfect, but it has reduced the number of informal settlements in its cities.