Kenya

A significant number of the population that drives urban economies in developing countries lives in informal settlements. These are characterized by limited basic infrastructure and poor access to essential services such as water, sanitation and security. From October 2019 to January 2020, I visited sixteen such settlements in rapidly urbanizing secondary towns in Kenya, whose infrastructure had been upgraded through a World Bank-funded project – Kenya Informal Settlement Improvement Project (KISIP). The objective of the visit was to collect data to understand the dynamics, interactions and outcomes related to the introduction of new services and infrastructure such as sewers, water distribution and household connections, ablution blocks, roads, and drainages in informal settlements.

During the visit, I conducted over sixty key informant interviews with residents in the different settlements, government officials both at state and regional levels, a world bank official, and consultants. In addition, I conducted field observations and reviewed 20 project-related reports. This allowed for accurate recreation of the experience during the upgrading process and field observations of the upgrading’s outcomes for each settlement.

Among the key insights was that dwellers consistently called for meaningful engagement during upgrading of their settlements as they claimed that their indigenous knowledge is often ignored and often goes unappreciated. In addition, they interpreted actions of different actors involved in upgrading differently, depending on the actors’ interests.

These data feed into the SUSIS project (Sanitation upgrading strategies for informal settlements), contributing insights into how actors can successfully introduce and sustain basic service offerings and technologies, such as sanitation, in contexts and environments associated with contested spaces and other conflicting actors. SUSIS further derives insights from the Wings ‘Informal’ pillar, with the aim of contributing to unravelling the complexity associated with the introduction of innovations and infrastructure in informal settlements. Understanding these dynamics is essential for the informed design of innovations and infrastructure targeted for these and other comparable spatial settings. 

This exercise paved way for the preparation of two academic research papers that will offer conceptual insights into how improvements in infrastructure in informal settlements interrelate with livelihoods and economic activities and hence influence upgrading outcomes for varied actors. Moreover, they will offer policy insights into how relationships between external actors and settlement dwellers affect outcomes of upgrading projects in informal settlements. Tentatively, these insights will also be shared in future workshops and seminars.