* REPORT : 3

HURUMA SLUMS UPGRADING INITIATIVE

DOCUMENTATION OF THE PROCESS LEADING UP TO SETTLEMENT PLANNING
Introduction
Over the last three years, the Nairobi City Council, Pamoja Trust, ITDG and a number of other stakeholders have been working closely with the residents of Huruma informal settlements towards the improvement their living conditions. Today, five of the six villages that make up Huruma informal settlements are at an advanced stage of urban planning. The planning process is geared towards the regularization of the settlements and opening up of opportunities for the residents of the five villages to construct adequate housing.

The envisaged outcomes of the upgrading process in Huruma are, settlements where the residents have secure land tenure, adequate housing, and basic services. Another of the paramount outcomes of the process is to ensure that the Huruma community develops an institutional framework that is able to manage, sustain, and deal with issues concerning the settlement.

Therefore, the approach of the upgrading effort, from the outset, has been to ensure that the communities' capacity to manage their own development process is strengthened. In Huruma this has entailed a comprehensive, if lengthy, process that is anchored on the community's participation in all activities including: awareness creation, community organization, enumeration and planning surveys, negotiation with local authorities and currently urban planning.

Though the process of upgrading in Huruma has been undertaken by the Department of Planning in Nairobi City Council, the Council acknowledges that issues of access to secure land, adequate housing and services for the poor are too broad for any one entity to solve alone. Solutions to these problems must involve collaboration between many actors. The Council therefore plays the role of coordinating a collaborative, flexible, negotiated upgrading process, which involves all the stakeholders.

It bears emphasizing that the success of upgrading in Huruma is not only dependent on the availability of resources, but also on a process that is sensitive to the community's involvement and the contribution of various stakeholders. Further, the lessons drawn from the Huruma process will impact on similar initiatives in any of Nairobi's over 100 informal settlements.

Profile of Huruma
The Huruma informal settlements are situated in Starehe division of Nairobi city. This informal part of Huruma consists of six villages: Kambi Moto, Mahira, Redeemed, Ghetto, Gitathuru and Madoya, all built on land belonging to the Nairobi City Council. The settlements have been in existence for as long as 28 years. The settlements occupy a total land area of 4.117 hectares.

Five of the six villages are involved in the upgrading initiative, i.e Kambi Moto, Mahira, Redeemed, Ghetto and Gitathuru. These five villages take up 3.817 hectares. They have a total population of 6564, which is made up of 2309 households. The normal structure seen in the Huruma settlements is a 12 by 10 foot shack built with an iron sheet roof, mud & wattle walls and a mud floor. Like most informal settlements the basic services in Huruma like water, sewage, road access, and toilets are inadequate and sometimes non-existent. The average household density per hectare for the five villages is 604.

Fig 1.

Village Area Households Density Population Tenant
H'holds
Structure Owner
H'holds

Kambi Moto
0.4 ha
539 1347 1241 375 79
Mahira 0.427 ha 384 899 1174 102 260
Redeemed 0.96 ha 259 269 798 88 153
Ghetto 0.28 ha 813 2309 2365 303 452
Gitathuru 1.75 ha 314 177 986 237 58
Totals 3.817 ha 2309 604hse/ ha 6564 1105 10021

Source: Pamoja Trust/ NCC enumeration survey October 2001
NOTE: The number of tenant and structure households shown on Fig 1 add up to 2107. A further 96 houses were found to be vacant and the status of occupiers in 106 houses could not be conclusively established by the enumeration exercise conducted in October 2001.

As shown above (Fig.1) the five villages in Huruma have varying socio-economic and even spatial-layout profiles. There are variations in the number of women headed households, economic activities, population age and densities. The most significant variation in regard to the upgrading though, is the number of tenant households as opposed to structure owner households. This variation is significant because it raises (especially among the Huruma residents), the question of WHO the beneficiaries of the upgrading ought to be: tenants or structure owners. The variation is well illustrated in two of the five villages, where only 18% of the households in Gitathuru are occupied by structure owners and in Mahira where structure owners occupy 68% of the households. These disparities among the villages have a significant effect on how a village reconciles the issue of beneficiaries and distribution of resources among their residents.

It is implicit, because of the variations, that the upgrading process is focused on each of the five villages individually even though the initiative is simultaneous in all the villages.

Community Organization and Awareness
Over the past five years the Huruma community has been able to come up with community based structures that can deal with issues that affect their settlements. Though there is a rich variety of community based organizations in the Huruma villages the Muungano wa Wanavijiji saving groups enjoy the largest following and are particularly concerned with issues of settlement upgrading. The saving groups attract a membership of tenants, structure owners (both resident and absentee structure owners). These saving groups also come together to form a joint Huruma group called Kamaregima, which addresses issues affecting the five villages. Similarly these Muungano groups also enjoy the support of the citywide Muungano wa Wanavijiji federation.

The community structures in Madoya, the Huruma village left out in the upgrading initiative, were not developed enough, at the time of the City Council's intervention, to counter opposition to the upgrading process by a few absentee structure owners with extensive commercial interest in the village.

It is appreciated though that, while the Muungano saving groups, in the other five villages, represent by and large the aspirations of their residents, they do not enjoy unanimous support. This is mostly attributed to a number of short-comings within the groups: Firstly, the saving groups are largely dominated by structure owners and it is only in the recent past that the groups have been compelled upon to include more tenants and youth members. It is therefore a major milestone that the structure owners in Kambi Moto have agreed to include their tenants in the upgrading process. Secondly, the saving groups have placed high barriers to entry, such as exorbitant registration fees for new members. The reason often given by the existing members is that new members were not involved in the initial struggle for recognition. Thirdly, all the groups have absentee structure owners as members. This presents a problem for Huruma's development partners, whose concern is the urban poor living within the villages and not property investors and speculators.

In terms of general community awareness, there have been several activities that have ensured all the residents of the Huruma villages are included in the upgrading initiative. The door-to-door enumeration exercise called on all residents to participate. Responses were enlisted from an average of 97% of the households in all the villages. The house-modeling exercises conducted in each of the villages have also provided a forum for discussion for all residents. This has been an effective tool for awareness building and inclusion of a broad spectrum of residents in the process. Further, and on an ongoing basis, activities concerning the upgrading process are routinely announced through posters and flyers distributed in the villages. The activities or events themselves are open to all residents of the villages.

The aspect of community awareness and participation is crucial to the upgrading initiative. It is crucial not only because it ensures the success of the current process of regularization and distribution of land, but more so because it forms the basis of building a sustainable community. Without which the gains made by the initiative may be sold to or taken over by other entities other than the intended beneficiaries.

Research on Huruma
The upgrading process has been anchored upon comprehensive research in the five-targeted villages. It is pertinent to note that much of the approach of much of the research has been participatory and therefore owned by the residents themselves.

Between the months of May and October 2001 the Nairobi City Council in conjunction with Pamoja Trust and the residents of five Huruma villages carried out an enumeration and mapping exercise as a step towards the regularization of these settlements. The enumeration process had five key elements to it. The numbering and identification of the parameters of the settlements and the measurement of the area occupied by them, the numbering of each house in the settlement, the administering of a questionnaire to each household, the analysis and sharing of an initial report with all stakeholders, and finally the verification of the information obtained.

This process of participatory research in Huruma has led a number of outcomes for the upgrading process:

Firstly the information has created a better understanding of the settlements for the community who are then empowered to deal with their issues and to negotiate with development partners from an enlightened position.
Secondly, the enumeration has leveraged the capacity of the community to come together and undertake the survey, while also strengthening and legitimizing the community's leadership structures.
Thirdly, the development partners have been able to better plan their intervention for upgrading purposes. This has been essential for identifying potential problem areas and taking measures to ensure a smooth process.
Development Strategy
The Huruma upgrading initiative is based on the Nairobi Informal Settlements Development Strategy on Slum Upgrading. The approached developed by the Nairobi Informal Settlement Coordination Committee (NISCC) provides broad guidelines for upgrading while stressing the importance of community involvement at all stages. The principal implementing agency of this strategy in Huruma is the Department of City Planning which has undertaken several activities in regard to tenure regularization for all six Huruma villages:

Tenure Regularization
The Nairobi City Council holds the land occupied by the Huruma informal settlements in public trust. The City Council has resolved to delineate the land and set it aside for upgrading. In an effort to regularize the tenure, the Council has passed a Council Minute that makes the six villages a Special Planning Area in accordance with the Physical Planning Act 1996. In doing so the conventional planning standards can be adjusted and the community based approach currently adopted supported. This allows for the lowering of city planning standards that can be tested on the ground in order to correspond to the social - cultural, economic and political realities of the residents.

In addition to there is a legal consultancy on alternative land tenure systems being carried out. The consultancy is intended to find the most appropriate forms of legal land tenure that may be applied in Huruma. This is based on the concern that conventional land title systems may fail to protect the upgraded settlements from market speculation and therefore make the targeted beneficiaries of the initiative vulnerable to strong market forces.

Urban Planning
Since March 2002, the five Huruma settlements have been undergoing a process of planning. A three pronged approach has been applied to this process:

1. The Community Process
2. The University planning Process
3. The City Council topographic survey

The Community Process - This has taken the form of house modeling. On the face of it, house modeling is the construction of a sample life-size house that represents the shelter aspirations of a slum community. Each of the five villages have been facilitated to concretize their housing expectation through a process of discussion, building consensus and then building a cloth house model.

Apart from making a physical representation of the house they would like to own the house modeling process was also aimed at developing a community plan for the sharing of land space in the settlements. This plan will inform the Nairobi City Council's land allocation and infrastructure development processes.

The houses modeled were therefore an attempt to reconcile several issues that affect sharing of land and that can only be ideally dealt with at the community level. The questions then that the house modeling was geared to answer area: what kind of house and services are sufficient for the Huruma; how much space would the houses and service lines occupy; and consequently how many residents would fit within the settlement if the community built such houses and what would happen to those residents left out.

Another outcome of the house modeling exercises was to come up with different community initiated house typologies that will be compared to those developed by the university process. It also creates space for policy makers, the private sector, and politicians to explore alternative options for investment and new options for planning and building standards.

Currently a permanent house has been put up in Ghetto, based on the village's dreams and discussions. The cost of the house is estimated at Kshs. 270,000/=. The cost can be substantially lower for construction on a larger scale and with the adoption of more appropriate building materials and technology.

The University Process - The Department of Architecture at the Jomo Kenyatta University has been carrying out an urban studio for the Huruma informal settlements. The exercise involves fifth year architecture students doing settlement plans for each of the five Huruma villages with corresponding house typologies and finally integrating the planned villages into the entire Huruma area.

The Council Process - The Council is currently undertaking an in-depth topographic survey of the five Huruma villages. This will provide a basis for professional urban planning. The outputs of the three processes will be considered in developing a professional urban plan for implementation.

Partnership
Several organizations have been involved in this process. Pamoja Trust and the NCC have been providing the leading role. While Pamoja Trust mobilized the communities and provided logistical funds for the meetings the City Council provided the policy and technical advise. The Council further facilitated for a favorable political environment through rallying support of the civic leaders and the Provincial Administration through the NISCC forum. Through the same forum several organizations have been enlisted and contributed in the process. ITDG have provided technical support during the house modeling. Others include Coopi International, Slum Dwellers International, Shelter Forum, University of Nairobi, Jomo Kenyatta University among others.

At this point of the process it is felt that there is a need to broaden the number of stakeholders. This is largely based on the increased need for technical, financial and institutional resources for the upgrading.

Working Objectives
The upgrading initiative in Huruma though successful has not be guided by any formal/conventional professional project document. While the Nairobi Informal Settlement Development Strategy has played a major role of bringing institutions and partners together and provided broad policy guidelines a more specific institutional arrangement and commitment have now become necessary for this initiative to become a reality.