Kenya women club together to leave slum life behind
KISUMU: The thought of getting old, retiring and still living in a slum used to scare Emma Ochieng. Now the 55-year-old primary teacher has a new house on an estate about a 45-minute drive from the city of Kisumu in western Kenya. For over 20 years, the single mother of one lived in Kisumu’s overcrowded Nyalenda slum, polluted by poor drainage, waste, noise and high crime rates. “Staying in a decent neighborhood was beyond my means,” Ochieng said. “Owning a house in the city was but a wild dream!”
But in 2015, she began contributing 500 Kenyan shillings ($4.95) per month to the Nyalenda Housing Cooperative, part of the Kisumu Local Urban Forum which helps members in five of the city’s slums access decent housing. Ochieng also joined Kenya’s National Cooperative Housing Union (NACHU), an umbrella body that builds affordable homes for low-income earners on estates known as “greenfields”. With people migrating from rural areas in search of jobs as local farm business suffer from extreme weather and rising food imports, the rapid pace of urbanization has pushed 56 percent of Kenya’s city dwellers into slums. “Informal structures are coming up faster than government planning,” said George Wasonga, CEO of the Civil Society Urban Development Platform. “People are moving into areas before the government can offer infrastructure for basic services like roads, water, sewer connections, electricity and security.” Today, across the globe, nearly one billion people live in slums and informal settlements in about 100,000 cities - about a quarter of the urban population.
Many are located on riverbanks or near dump sites and industrial areas, often on degraded soils and in swampy, steep or flood-prone areas susceptible to disasters. Poorly constructed homes expose communities to extreme temperatures, a lack of ventilation and toxic waste - all detrimental to their health. Of the 10 million more people added each year to sub-Saharan Africa’s urban population, 7 million end up in slums. Only 2 million of them can expect to move out to a better environment, according to figures quoted in a 2016 UN report on slums.
Savings groups
Ochieng is one of the lucky ones. She got the key to her two-roomed house in April 2016, enabling her to leave the Nyalenda slum. Jessica Wekesa, NACHU’s Nyanza regional coordinator, explained how the cooperative assists people to save on a small scale so they can acquire their own land and homes. In groups of 20, they identify a suitable parcel of land. NACHU then conducts a background check and helps them register the land, also making a loan for its purchase. The organization constructs starter homes of two rooms with a bathroom and kitchen, and hands them over to the owners, who can expand their property into a three-bedroom house.
Over a few years, the client pays for the land, the starter home and related services at a 14 percent rate on the reducing balance of their loan, after which they get the title deed. In the past seven years, NACHU and its partners have built about 2,000 housing units in seven regions of Kenya for low-income earners, ranging from small traders to motorcycle taxi operators and teachers. “We use cheap, locally available technology,” said George Kopallah, coordinator of the Kisumu Local Urban Forum.