Kenya's Slums

Today they must eat - the crisis in Kenya's slums

Hundreds of small scale community organisations - like the Huruma Centre Youth Group (HCYG), the Mwelu Foundation, MYSA and others - work within the Nairobi slums to give the slum-dwellers opportunities that they would never otherwise have. When such initiatives come from within the slums, and are driven by the slum community itself, this has the added benefit of empowering those communities, and building dignity and respect from within. However, it is becoming all the more difficult for the average slum dwellers to make a living and eke out a survival, as a number of factors - rising food prices, drought in Kenya, the global economic downturn - make life in the slums ever more of a challenge. Concern Worldwide has carried out recent studies into the pending crisis in the slums resulting from such national and global factors.

Nairobi has the dubious distinction of being home to Africa's largest slum: Kibera. If Kibera were the city's only slum, then maybe something would have been done about it long before now, but unfortunately, there are many more, including Mukuru, Korogocho, Mathare, and Kawingari, to name but a few. The lilting names hide a sprawling mass of humanity living in makeshift shacks with no running water, pay-per-use communal pit latrines, and whose meagre means make basic services like schools and clinics beyond reach.

It is possible to visit Nairobi, yet be blissfully unaware of the existence of these slums as one travels from hotels in leafy suburbs to well-equipped shopping centres to the safari parks teaming with wildlife and the beach resorts on the Indian Ocean. What most tourists don't see are the two million people - more than half of Nairobi's population - who live in extreme poverty in the slums. And that population is increasing at an estimated rate of 6.9 percent every year, due to a combination of population growth and migration to the city from rural areas. Life in the slum communities of Kibera, Mathare and others is a daily struggle just to survive.

Money

The primary struggle is for money: money to pay the landlord for the one-room, mud-floored, tin-roofed shack with no toilet or running water. Money to buy food, because there is no room to grow anything. Money for water, which is expensive, and every drop is at a price. Money is even needed to pay for the communal toilets. When money is scarce, slum dwellers resort to "flying toilets' - a plastic bag used at night and flung out in the morning to land on nearby rooftops and pathways. Free primary education, introduced by the government in 2003, hasn't reached the more than 1,500 primary schools operating in the slums - so it takes money to pay for school fees. For those who get sick, all medical care costs money. Without an income, survival in the slums is impossible. People must work incredibly hard just to meet their most basic needs.

Kenya has been through a difficult time. The wave of violence following the disputed presidential and national elections in December 2007 shocked the country to the core. Communities that had been integrated for years became enemies overnight, divided by ethnicity. Violence erupted in the grain producing West, not only uprooting families from their homes and creating hardship, but also disrupting the planting season that is the foundation for the country's food supply. In mid 2008, the world saw global food prices skyrocket and reach unprecedented highs that affected Kenya's ability to import sufficient quantities of food at affordable rates. And this year, the rains in Kenya have failed twice, affecting maize production - one of the nation's staple foods.

What does this mean for the extreme poor in Nairobi's slums? The price of maize, the staple food upon which they rely, has more than doubled in the last year. Water costs have increased by over 60 percent and the price of cooking fuels has risen by 70 percent. The cost of feeding a family has doubled. All these increases in items essential to basic survival would be manageable if incomes had also increased. However, incomes have shrunk by over 25 percent in the last year. These factors have pushed hundreds of thousands over the edge - driving them from chronic poverty even deeper into absolute destitution.

Lehman Brothers and the 2008 Collapse

The collapse of Lehman Brothers Bank in the US in 2008 sent shockwaves around the world as stock markets crumbled and Western governments spent vast quantities of tax payers' money propping up ailing banks. The repercussions of the financial meltdown hit Kenya quite hard. Tourism is a mainstay of the Kenyan economy, but as the financial crisis sank in, trips to Kenya diminished. The people in Nairobi who feel the bite of the downturn in tourism most dramatically are the hotel cleaners, the guards, the drivers, the laundry workers - the low-paid labour force who reside in Nairobi's slums, and who have very little job security.

Kenya had a thriving floriculture, with planeloads of world-class quality roses being flown every morning to the flower auctions in Amsterdam. But the flowers industry is another luxury that has suffered cutbacks in Europe. Thousands of Kenyan flower-pickers and packers who were the labour backbone for the flower industry have been let go. Many were the household breadwinners in the slums.

The drop in remittances has also been a huge blow to Kenya's poorest. For many slum dwellers, small amounts of money sent home to them regularly by family members who have left Kenya to work abroad are a lifeline. In the cash-strapped West, many migrant workers, including Kenyans, have lost their jobs: now, they have nothing to send home.

The combination of skyrocketing food prices and shrinking incomes has forced many people to find other ways to earn enough money to feed their families. Normal coping strategies are first implemented. People walk to work rather than take the bus. This means leaving home earlier in the morning and getting home later at night, thus leaving their children alone to fend for themselves for longer periods. But that's life in the slums.

However, the kinds of survival strategies families are forced into are becoming increasingly hazardous for slum dwellers. Families are buying bulkier, lower nutritional value foods, reducing the number of meals per day and reducing meal size. An increasing number of children are being brought to the health clinics on the peripheries of the slums showing signs of malnutrition. There is a slow starvation happening in the slums.

We have seen increasing numbers of children taken out of schools. While people recognise the value of education as a future benefit and a passport out of the slums, that's for tomorrow. Today they must eat. They save on school fees, and the children contribute to the household income by begging and by combing the rubbish heaps. They save on visits to the health clinic as they can neither afford the fee nor the queuing time when they could be earning money. As a consequence it is often too late by the time an ill person reaches a clinic. Commercial sex work is also on the increase with children engaging in it at an ever younger age, with all the consequent problems of a ruined childhood including injury, contraction of HIV and other infections.

Criminality, including robbery and illegal alcohol brewing is on the increase, as is gang culture. For many children growing up in the slums, with little future apart from child labour, prostitution and hardship, solace can be found in glue sniffing and alcohol. Camaraderie, protection and status can be found in the gangs who are always looking for new recruits. It is only the lucky ones who can climb out of that downward spiral.

Community Spirit

Life in Kenya's slums is harsh but that is not the full picture. Within the slums there is a strong community spirit, where there is give and take, where one family might be down on their luck today and will be helped by friends who themselves were assisted by others last week. It's the way things work. There is also joy and laughter and music and dance. There is colour and vibrancy and life is lived to the full. It is the only way to survive.

The people of the Kenya slums are also citizens of Kenya. They vote, they pay taxes, they contribute to the economy. They are entitled to the same respect and rights enjoyed by the other citizens of Nairobi - to free primary education, to clean water, to accessible health services. In short, they are entitled to a life of dignity.

Over two hundred million people currently live in slums around the world, primarily in the developing world. They live in chronic poverty. Occasionally a number of events come together, such as what is currently happening in Kenya, to tip people over the edge from a situation of chronic poverty into one of crisis. Criteria exist to define when chronic poverty changes to an emergency situation in rural areas, but these criteria often don't apply in an urban slum setting because of the high population density and the high risk 'coping strategies' that the urban poor adopt. These 'coping strategies' guarantee that the poor remain entrenched in the slums for generations to come. With the world's slum population estimated to double every 15 years, is it not time that the United Nations takes the lead in developing emergency criteria for urban slums?

It has been argued that slums are necessary as a cheap labour source to enable economies to function. Almost every household in Nairobi's leafy suburbs has cooks, cleaning staff, guards and nannies who come from the slums, enabling a lifestyle which is unaffordable in more developed economies. Construction and light industry all benefit from cheap labour. It has also been argued that the slum problem is so big that it is difficult to find solutions; therefore nothing gets done. But the slums are also rich, rich in people, rich in skills, rich in culture, rich in ability and capacity. They do not need to depend on outsiders to solve their problems for them. With the right policies, strategies and resources, with proper governance structures, with access to employment at a fair wage, with the same access to education and health facilities as other citizens of the country, the slums could change from being a problem to becoming a resource.

The people of the slums deserve a fair chance.

Anne O'Mahony,
Country Director Kenya
Concern Worldwide