WUNRN
URBAN SLUMS CRISIS - EXTREME
POVERTY, INSECURITY & INDIGNITY FOR WOMEN
NAIROBI, 4 December 2013 (IRIN) - In Mathare, a sprawling
slum in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, children in tattered clothes play with
raw waste flowing from a burst sewage pipe. In the alley, crowded with
tin-and-wood shanties, a food kiosk filled with people feasting on smoked fish
stands on the burst pipe. Close by, a woman fries chopped potatoes on an open
fire.
Uninsulated electricity cables hang precariously in people’s single-storey
houses. The residents know the dangers, but they have little choice. They are
not part of the national power grid and might never have a legal
connection. A water-vending kiosk stand beside two dirty, poorly
constructed pit latrines.
“The crisis of poor infrastructure, overcrowding, few resources and poor
sanitation facilities is exacerbated further by a high disease and morbidity
burden, characterized by high levels of malnutrition among children and the
aged and high rate of communicable diseases like typhoid, malaria, dysentery
and tuberculosis, with most families being unable to afford medical care. Health
facilities are also limited, unequipped and understaffed,” Bessie Nikhozi,
assistant programme manager of urban livelihoods and social protection at
Concern Worldwide, told IRIN.
Paul Odero, a 27-year-old father of two and a resident of Mathare, told IRIN,
“Here we share everything because nobody can afford anything of his own. We
share latrines, and these people selling food near the latrine have no space to
put their kiosks. It must be near there because that is where you can find
space.”
He added, “We have no place to dispose our garbage, and we just throw it
anywhere. At times, you find children playing with used sanitary pads because
the woman and girls who use it have nowhere to take it to. The children get
diarrhoea and many die.”
Disease
In 2012, in a span of just six months, at least three children died from
electrocution while playing with illegally connected power lines. In the same
year, an illegal electricity connection caused a fire that destroyed some 300
houses, leaving thousands without shelter.
Mary Muiruri, a community health worker, told IRIN that the open dumpsites and
the fumes emanating from them have meant respiratory infections are rampant.
“The running noses among small children you see do not mean their mothers don’t
care. They do, but the health risks associated with poor waste disposal means
their children are constantly suffering from respiratory infections. It is that
bad,” she said.
“It looks simple but many women in the slums cannot go to work because they are
constantly looking after sick children. Such people can’t come out of poverty
because how do they get income? The unhygienic conditions make them very sick
often,” Muiruri noted to IRIN.
In 2010, the global health charity, Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) reported that
pneumonia and respiratory tract infections accounted for 40 percent of all
consultations in its heath facilities in Kibera, a Nairobi slum.
An estimated 53 percent of those who scavenge at a dumpsite in Dandora, another
slum, have respiratory tract infections, coughs and asthma, according to
Concern Worldwide.
The few toilets available in Mathare are privatized, and residents pay a user
fee of five shillings (US$0.06). Many cannot afford this daily fee.
"Extremely poor people living in urban slums like Mathare are forced, on a
daily basis, to significantly compromise their long-term well-being to meet
their short-term survival needs. This includes pulling their children from
school, engagement in transactional sex, etc.,” Ann Marie Swai, the food,
income and markets coordinator at Concern Worldwide, told IRIN.
Around
a billion people living in the world’s cities today reside in deprived areas like Mathare, with few or no basic
amenities. In Afghanistan, Chad, Ethiopia and Nepal, more than 90 percent of
urban populations live in such deprived areas, according to the UN-Habitat.
“It is a concern that people live in overcrowded areas without any adequate
policing or electricity, which raises a lot of other issues - and particularly
the protection of women and children. They only have minimum services, and the
humanitarian challenges they face can be overwhelming,” Kyung-wha Kang, the
deputy emergency relief coordinator for the UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs, told IRIN.
According to the UN World Health Organization, children in Nairobi slums are
two and half times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than in other
areas of the city.
Moses Owino, the district medical officer of health in Mathare, told IRIN that
nutrition for children and access to healthcare is a challenge in urban slums.
“There are many young mothers who can hardly afford to feed their children, and
this means the issue of malnutrition for children under five years is very
high. The health facility can hardly cope with the demand here. HIV prevalence
is higher than the national average. Urban slums are faced with a health
crisis,” Owino told IRIN.
According to Concern Worldwide,“The skyrocketing
costs of food [have] pushed an already desperate people into extreme poverty,
rendering them incapable of feeding their families or paying for basic services
such as healthcare, rent and school fees.”
The organization adds: “With no land or means of growing their own food, slum
residents are entirely reliant on markets [for food]. The price of maize, a
basic staple food for the poorest, has increased by 133 percent over the past
year, while incomes have shrunk by 21 percent, forcing families to resort to
desperate measures to survive.”
Crime
In Korogocho, another of Nairobi’s slums, Beatrice Awuor has yet to obtain
routine immunizations for her six-month-old baby. She is sick and cannot walk
to the nearest clinic, almost 10km away. Frequent gang attacks and muggings
have meant many of the community health workers who carry out door-to-door
immunization have no access here.
“They [immunizers] cannot come here because these boys [criminals] will attack
them. We live at their mercy, and they snatch anything from visitors who come
here. They want you to give them protection money, and if you don’t, they just
attack,” Awuor said.
Lack of jobs for many of the young inhabitants in the slums has meant they
often turn to crime to make ends meet.
According to the Institute for Development Studies (IDS): “The problems of under-policing, unemployment or lack of services in slums
ultimately stem from the powerlessness of slum dwellers who find it hard to
connect with state authorities.”
And hidden in this violence lies a crisis, says Aggrey Nyange, an urban
planning expert at the University of Nairobi: displacement due to violent
crime.
“Organized gangs and criminal elements within slums have rendered many people
in slums homeless. There are people who are marked by these gangs who can
hardly access their homes. Maybe they refused to pay protection fees. It is a
sad situation that needs to be dealt with,” said Nyange.
He added: “People talk about violence and crime but rarely mention the effect
it has on [victims].”
Resilience
As rural populations migrate to urban areas, looking for new economic and job
opportunities, cities will continue to grow, and governments will need to
increase efforts to ensure that urban infrastructure like housing is able to
cope with the growth.
OCHA’s Kang noted to IRIN that “the settlements into these urban slums are
often spontaneous,” and that governments in developing countries like Kenya
will need to have both policies and the political will “to able to track these
populations and provide the services to them.”
She added that standards set by the government, like the requirement that one
must acquire five acres of land to open a government-recognized educational
institution, are “unrealistic and these must be reviewed to enable as many
children as possible in slums to have access to education.”
There is need for more initiatives to build the resilience of slum dwellers.
“They don’t sit back and wait. Many of them struggle to make ends meet, and
initiatives such as access to credit and community dialogues are critical in
ensuring that they are able to cope,” Concern’s Swai said.
“By working to build their resilience through enabling them to access better
livelihood opportunities, health and nutrition, and education social services,
we are supporting them to improve their longer-term welfare.”
Organizations like Concern Worldwide supports the extremely poor through
increased access to financial services and capital, advocating for adequate
social protection policies and services, and community engagement to improve
the operating environment for small businesses in the informal settlements.
To date, the organization has given over 14,000 people in Kenya's urban slums
cash transfers through mobile phone technology, and its nutrition efforts
currently target a projected 225,000 children and pregnant and lactating
mothers and a population base of 1.2 million in the urban slums.
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WUNRN
Direct Link to Full 59-Page Amnesty
International Report:
Website Link: http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR32/002/2010/en
"More
than half the residents of Nairobi live in informal settlements and slums.
Their housing is inadequate and they have little access to clean water, health
care and other essential public services. Violence against women is widespread
where ineffective policing results in rape and other violence against women
going largely unpunished. This report examines the experiences of women living
in four slums in Nairobi. It calls on the Kenyan government to address
gender-based violence against women and to ensure women's access to sanitation
and public security services."