Overview
Residents in informal urban settlements are form- ing organizations and networks to demand their human rights and improve their quality of life.
An important part of transformation is people believing that they are worthy. When you are vulnerable and weak, the collective gives you power. The greater the critical mass, the greater the power.
— Sheela Patel
The industrialization of cities in the global South has spurred economic growth. But that growth often does not appear in the incomes of the poor and working-class people whose work makes industrialization possible. Governments, both local and those providing aid from abroad, consistently fail to address the needs of these groups. Refugees, survivors of environmental disasters, and people who have been displaced due to discrimination by race, class, and other identities find shelter in informal settlements in countries including India and Kenya.
While informal settlements, or slums, are characterized by overpopulation and a lack of basic amenities like sewage systems, they are home to vibrant communities. When these communities organize themselves into networks at the local, national, and international levels, the settlements are able to share knowledge, collaborate, and create strategies for building power and meeting their needs.
Savings groups provide one of the building blocks for these networks. Here, community members pool together their money to form a fund that can be drawn from to support projects and meet needs in the community. In South Africa, one fund has loaned money to more than 2,000 members for business and livelihood projects, and it has a 95 percent repayment rate. But these savings groups do more than just pool money. As one member of a Liberian informal settlement network reported, “They collect people and build a critical mass. When the savings groups are networked, federations are born.”
For example, in Kenya, 15 to 20 women might form a network, supported by a small amount of funding that enables them to train and work together. Their network would then become part of a city-wide federation of other small networks. Each local group or settlement chooses its leaders—chair, secretary, and treasurer—and then creates teams: a finance team, a data team, and a documentation team (which trains young people to collect data through GIS, gather stories, and contribute to a blog). The leaders of each of these local networks congregate every three months in city and county forums to discuss challenges and decisions. Reports from local meetings are delivered by a representative of each county at the national level. At the national level, a working group of 12 people are selected according to their skills for partnering with governments and officials.
Informal settlement networks raise the voices of people living in slums, making their lived experiences and realities the basis for change. Instead of a top-down approach, the residents of the settlements decide what projects are most important for addressing their needs.
One of the primary needs facing informal settlements is secure housing tenure. Just about every informal settlement around the world is dealing with constant evictions and the immense harm these cause to residents. By organizing together, informal settlement networks can fight back.
In Nigeria, large-scale evictions in Lagos and Port Harcourt inspired the Nigerian Federation to support community-led mapping and profiling of informal settlements. They collected data from every informal settlement in both cities and used GPS boundary maps and geo-tagged information about the utilities (water, electricity, etc.) to make the informal settlements visible and support community members organizing to prevent evictions. At the same time, an allied NGO called the Nigerian SDI Alliance used multimedia to shine a public spotlight on the crisis.
Women are at the center of many of these settlement networks—negotiating for space, organizing for the right to stay, and building necessary infrastructure. Women often organize the savings groups and hold leadership roles that reflect their knowledge as shapers of their communities and as those who are most negatively affected by poor conditions in the settlements. The data they gather is used in negotiations with local governments, and the money and resources they pool are used to meet acute needs in emergencies. Peer-to-peer learning occurs as one group of women trains the next on savings collection, data aggregation, and negotiation tools.
These networks connect settlements locally and around the world. One of the primary connectors of settlements globally is Slum Dwellers International, an organization made up of more than 30 federations (or networks) of informal settlements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia which supports learning and collaboration across national and regional borders. Federations working to stop evictions in India compare their experiences with those of federations in Kenya. Data collection methods are adapted from one settlement to another. Local leaders attend meetings with government officials in different parts of the world to share strategies for success.
Informal settlement networks are an important example of the grassroots power that poor people can have when they come together to provide for one another and demand what they need.
