Africa's cities are growing — and changing — rapidly. Without appropriate planning, they will become increasingly chaotic, inefficient and unsustainable. In many countries, planning legislation dates back to the colonial era. It is ill-equipped to deal with contemporary urban problems. A shortage of urban planning and management professionals trained to respond to urban complexity with progressive pro-poor approaches exacerbates urban dysfunction. Read more.
That food goes to waste in the Northern Hemisphere is common knowledge. Grocery stores, bakeries, supermarkets, all throw out large quantities of edible goods simply because health and safety rules dictate that they are past their sell-by date. Countries like Kenya, with increasingly affluent middle classes that shop in malls and eat in restaurants, have jumped on to the waste bandwagon and now also produce large quantities of food that ends up rotting in its cities' extended dumpsites. Read more or join the discussion.
Without the ongoing support of their rural families, migrants in Nairobi slums would have little chance of making it. Family networks provide a crucial backbone on which migrants can rely on in order to be able to survive in the city and save money for their future. Grandparents and extended family contribute in the upbringing of children while parents seek urban work. The older generations act as custodians of wealth, overseeing how remittances are invested and providing informal insurance/retirement schemes to safeguard their descendants' future. Read more or join the discussion.
The Kenyan federation of slum dwellers, Muungano wa Wanavijiji has succeeded in firmly establishing itself as an force to be reckoned with on the national arena. As their domestic influence grows, they have also begun to focus on strengthening ties with similar groups in the region and beyond. Read more or join the discussion.
The 2007 Nairobi World Social Forum (WSF) was a controversial event because while it brought social activists together to discuss urban poverty, impoverished Kenyans were effectively excluded from the function due to the high cost of attending. As a result of the controversy, many WSF participants decided to see for themselves how things worked in the slums. This resulted in a flurry of tours around Kibera, Nairobi's biggest informal settlement, effectively laying the groundwork for the creation of a slum tourism infrastructure in the area. Read more or join the discussion.
The fact that developed countries have been using Africa as a dumping ground for electronic waste is an old story. Under the guise of "charitable donations," tons of e-products of dubious worth — refrigerators, washing machines, computers, cellular phones, TVs (the list goes on) — are disposed of on the continent every year. Kenya is no exception to this trend: it is estimated that every day the port of Mombasa receives thousands of electronic devices. These subsequently get sold on to businesses and other institutions, but their shelf life is approaching its end and most of this equipment lives out its final years in the country and is subsequently not adequately disposed of. Read more or join the discussion.
Nairobi is not the city it was five years ago. The capital of Kenya is transforming its skyline: high-rises are mushrooming up and away from the Central Business District in a quest to find unoccupied space and expand. Accompanying this vertical climb is the ongoing construction of a network of roads and bypasses, aimed to make Nairobi a more fluid and modern city. Some of the key roads that are now nearing completion have been under construction for years. This has opened up an opportunity for street vendors to create informal markets and stalls from which to provide the workforce with food and refreshments. Read more or join the discussion.
When talking about foreign investment in Africa, China springs to mind first. Chinese malls, Chinese highways, Chinese bridges. But Chinese housing? Not so much. Because like so many other investors, the Chinese failed to link the target market with the much-needed quality social housing. On a continent where mortgage markets barely exceed 5% of GDP (compare that with 40% of GDP in North America and a whopping 80% in Denmark!), owning a house is merely a dream for most — a pretty far-off dream. Read more.
A short man wearing a hooded coat pushes back the door to a small shed. Lying by the door, his closed eyes caught in the path of a dusty ray of sunshine, a young man of about twenty stirs. The man lying next to him scratches his arm and wraps himself tighter in his jacket. Next to them another four men are stretched out on the packed earth, unaware of the intrusion. This is Mathare and these men, like many others in shacks on either side of them, have rented a piece of floor to have a place to rest for the night. They might not have blankets and a mattress to lie on, but the warmth of their bodies is enough to stave off the worst of the cold. Read more or join the discussion.
Refugee Women of Somali origin living in Eastleigh - a neighborhood in the east of Nairobi that over the course of a few decades became a major stronghold for Somalis escaping the war back home, do not have the luxury of choosing how to live their lives in the same way their male counterparts do. Read more or join the discussion.