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* REPORT : 81

A REPORT ON THE AFRICA PLATFORM OF THE URBAN POOR. PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE HELD IN CAPE TOWN IN MAY 2006.

The Africa Platform for the Urban Poor was conceptualized in the context of a growing interest in the strategies employed by SDI affiliates in Africa in relation to building relationships among and between the urban poor and their governments to secure tenure as well as provide a sustainable and inclusive way to deal with urban poverty.

Over the past four years Shack Dwellers International has expanded dramatically in Sub-Saharan Africa. From an initial base in four countries the network has increased to an additional ten countries with contacts having been made in a further seven. This expansion has both been in terms of breadth and depth. Where SDI has presence, the aim has been to build networks of the urban poor that have linkages with local and national governments and that seek to address the issues of urbanization and poverty on city-wide scale.

This growing process has been given further impetus by an added dimension of the work of the SDI secretariat in South Africa that has strived to link the country processes emerging to other stakeholders at the continental and international levels. This includes New Partnership for Development in Africa (NEPAD), Africities, UCLGA, African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD), Cities Alliance, UnHabitat, the World Bank and major bilaterals.

The meeting on the Africa Platform of the Urban Poor was attended by delegates from ten African countries . The delegates included professionals and politicians from seven local authorities, community leaders from federated networks of the urban poor from nine countries as well as academics and NGOs working on urban poverty issues in South Africa and Malawi.

The program was divided into two main activities. The first activity was presentations by Communities and City officials on partnerships that were working to address the challenges of urbanization. The second activity was a focused discussion on what a platform of the urban poor in an African Context would do.

Proceedings of the First Sessions - Partnership Presentations By City Federations and Local Authorities

Six presentations were made. Four joint presentations were made by the City Federations and Local Authorities from 

  1. Bulawayo Zimbabwe,
  2. Lilongwe Malawi,
  3. Thema, Ghana,
  4. Gobabis Namibia.

 

Two additional presentations were given by NGOs and Federation members from

  1. Abuja, Nigeria
  2. Cape Town, South Africa.

 

The delegates from Abuja, Nigeria talked about the challenges they were facing related to the recent widespread evictions. The Community profiling team from the Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC) presented findings from an ongoing profiling exercise of informal settlements in the Cape Town Metro.

In the presentations the communities chronicled the building of relationships with their Local Authority. The communities had tenaciously worked at making Local Authorities understand how they worked. This was not always easy.

The Bulawayo Municipality official acknowledged that their City Policies had not been pro-poor and this had made it very difficult for them to find a way to work with communities of the urban poor who approached them. The Bulawayo Federation had consistently sort to engage the City around land issues for over four years with no success, until an exchange visit between the Bulawayo City Official, the Bulawayo Federation and the Windhoek Municipality with the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia. This visit resulted in a better understanding of what the Federation in Bulawayo had been proposing over the four years. The Bulawayo Federation has since carried out a joint survey with the City in Killarney, a squatter settlement in the outskirts of Bulawayo, where the Federation had organized groups. The city and the Federation has gone further and are working on a development of 100 housing units together and an additional 260 families had been allocated plots in the aftermath of evictions spearheaded by Central Government. The City will provide all technical expertise to the project and the community is mobilizing the resources as well as the labour that will be required for the installation of the infrastructure as well as housing construction.

In the Lilongwe case the Malawi Federation has mobilized over 2000 families and approached the Local Authority with the idea of building their own homes. They got land for 220 families and have managed to build all 220 houses in two months.

The Lilongwe example showed the capacity of organized communities as well innovation in terms of using appropriate and affordable building materials. All the houses were built using adobe bricks. The experience of Lilongwe has encouraged other Federations in Blantyre as well as Zimbabwe to experiment with alternative building materials.  

The experience of Lilongwe has also encouraged the building of formal partnerships between the Malawi Federation with the Blantyre Municipal Assembly. This partnership has broadened the scope of cooperation between the federation and the City.

The successes shown in Lilongwe and Blantrye has resulted in a recognition of the growing incidence of urban poverty in Malawi, a challenge hitherto ignored in a country whose priority has been rural poverty. The Malawi presentation showed how communities of the urban poor are providing new solutions to Cities problems as well as impacting on National policies to reduce poverty.

At a follow up session in the International Slum Dwellers Conference held two days later, the Minister of Housing from Malawi pledged 15,000 plots in major cities to the Malawi Federation, and SDI gave a matching pledge for housing finance.

The Gobabis experience demonstrated how small local authorities can provide lessons for larger cities. The Gobabis federation has over the years consistently built a working relationship with their local authority on land and housing. Local Authority officials from Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia have visited Gobabis to learn from it. These visits have also cemented the relationship between Gobabis Town and the Federation.

The Gobabis initiative has benefited from an annual cash injection into the Federation’s Twahangana Urban Poor Fund by the National Government. Over the past four years the Namibia Housing Ministry has donated N$1 million per annum to this revolving fund. The Fund has been used in Gobabis to pre-finance land acquisition and housing development.

A similar relationship between the Federation, its urban Poor Fund and national government exist in South Africa. At a follow up international conference two days later the South African Minister pledged an annual subsidy allocation of R230 million (over US$30 million) to South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor via its own financial instrument – uTshani Fund.

The Thema Municipality in Ghana recently allocated land to members of the Ghana Federation.  Thema is a dormitory town to Accra and as such has seen unprecedented growth as pressure on housing in Accra has grown. This has resulted in the emergence of informal housing in the form of ‘backyard shacks and squatting. The problem is compounded by the very complex nature of land ownership in Ghana as whole where Local Authorities often do not ‘own’ land. The Ghana Federation, in conjuction with the Thema Municipality, and with assistance from other SDI countries in Africa, carried out enumeration surveys in Thema to ascertain the extent of the housing problem as well as working togther to come up with some workable strategies on the very complex land ownership issues.  The result of this enumeration has been a muting of a pilot scheme that will secure land for the landless backyard shack dwellers in Thema.

In the presentation by the Nigerians the emotions brought about by the senselessness of indiscriminate evictions were evident. The Federal government of Nigeria had ordered widespread evictions without any consultation or explanation. Community organizations, as well as local political structures, had not been consulted and despite numerous calls to halt the evictions they continued. The discussion in the context of the meeting was how the process of the Africa Platform could be used to influence such events and how experiences with Local Authorities elsewhere in Africa could be used to influence and halt evictions.

The CORC team presented the findings of the ongoing exercise to profile and document all informal settlements in theCape Town Metro. They highlighted the fact that despite being home to over  30% of the population in the city, non of these settlements were part of ‘mainstream’ mapping in the City’s ordinance maps. The surveys had also revealed that there was a disparity between the City’s information on informal settlements and what the team had found. Settlements were growing and being established on a daily basis and there was almost a constant need to update information. The team also acknowledged the prevalence of evictions that go unreported because the victims were too poor and unorganized.  The profiling team was exclusively made up of mostly young men and women from the informal settlements of Cape Town. Despite living in informal settlements, they had been shocked at the degrading conditions that the poor were forced to live in. All the presenters talked about how empowering the process of gathering this information had to them as individuals and to the communities they had profiled. They were in the process of collating and packaging this information to share it more widely as well as use it to provide the basis for negotiations with the City.

Proceedings of the Discussions on the Africa Platform

The second aspect of the meeting was a focused discussion on the Africa Platform. The preceding sessions had set the tone in terms of what experiences could be shared in the context of the Africa Platform as well as the capacities that existed in the various Federation and Local Authority partnerships, and the challenges that existed.

This discussion was held in four groups who were asked to answer essentially two questions:

  • What the Africa Platform for the Urban poor should do?
  • What the Africa Platform for the Urban Poor should not do?

The group discussions were followed by a plenary discussion that came up with action points to carry the process forward.

In the discussions of what the Africa Platform would do there was some divergence with one out of the three groups opting for a formalized network with a secretariat. However the majority of participants felt that there was a plethora of such networks and that the form that would suit the process orientation of the majority of community federations represented at the meeting would be a loose network that would have a mandate to do the following:-

  • Provide a basis from which communities of the urban poor and their government partners (both local and central) learn from each other’s experience on strategies to address poverty at a city-wide level and to scale. These experiences would include city-wide informal settlement profiling, slum upgrading and securing tenure for the marginalized as well as alternative to forced evictions.
  • That the process of the Africa Platform be based on practical lessons that work and are inclusive.
  • That the process starts with pilots of six local authorities and City Federations that would share experiences among and between each other. The six local authorities identified were

1.     Windhoek Municipality and the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia

2.      Blantyre City Assemby and the Malawi Federation

3.      Abuja where the issue of evictions was identified but that the        stakeholders in negotiations still needed to be identified.

4.      Accra Municipal Authority and the Ghana Federation

5.      Durban Metro and South Africa’s Federation of the Urban Poor

6.      Kisumu Municipality and Kenya’s Muungano waWanavijiji

The process would draw in other Local Authorities and organized community groups to provide learning hubs in the four African regions viz Southern Africa, Central Eastern Africa, East Africa and West Africa

Finally it was agreed that Beth Chitekwe-Biti would provide a coordinative support to the platform’s activities with the assistance of the SDI-Africa Secretariat.

Third Day’s Activities: Visit To Cape Town Housing Department And Site Visit To Khayelitsha/Brown’s Farm

In order to contextualise the discussions and outcomes of the previous sessions, the South African hosts organised a visit to the Cape Town City Council where discussions were held with the Head of Housing and key members of his staff.

This was followed by a site visit to a savings collective in Site C, Khayelitsha and to a house construction site, where the Minister of Housing from Malawi inauguarated a house built by the SA Federation in partnership with the city.

These activities are captured in the photo essay that follows.

On the Bus to Khayelitsha

 

 

 

 

 

Conference Delagates – Africa Platform

 

Malawi Minister Opens FEDUP House. LtoR: Fedup President: Presiding Bishop Methodist Church Southern Africa: President, SDI;  Minister of Housing, Malawi.

Follow up Conference: International Slum Dwellers Conference – Hosted by the South African Minister of Housing.

The planning and implementation of the Africa Platform conference included dialogue with Minister Lindiwe Sisulu of South Africa. These discussions led to an offer by the Minister to host an international conference for the Urban Poor at the same time.

This conference also ran for three days and included most delegates to the Africa Platform. They were joined by many more slum dwellers and officials from several South African provinces, from Asia and Brasil.

Whilst this conference was a stand alone event, many of its outcomes emerged from the planning and implementation of the Africa Platform. The highlights included:

  • Signing of a Memorandum of Agreement between SDI, FEDUP and the South African Dept of Housing.
  • Signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between SDI, Interacao and the Brasilian Ministry of Cities.
  • Adoption of a Joint Declaration by SDI and SA Government to be taken to WUF in Vancouver and to AMCHUD.
  • Pledge of 15,000 sites to Malawi Federation by the Malawi Minister
  • Pledge of 6,000 subsidies to FEDUP by South African Minister.

 

 

SA Federation of the Urban Poor at International Slum Dwellers Conference, Cape Town

 

 

 

 

 

Western Cape Premier Rasool Opens ISDC Conference

 

 

SA Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu Delivers Keynote Address at ISDC Conference