Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Genet Alem
(TU Dortmund University)
Manuel Ramos (ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Nadine Appelhans
(TU Berlin)
- Stream:
- Environment and Geography
- Location:
- David Hume, LG.09
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Urban grassroots initiatives in Africa are pooling together very much needed resources to cop up with challenges of rapid urbanisation. The panel examines these actors and their initiatives within a dynamic national and international policy context and local institutional framework.
Long Abstract:
Africa's urban population has been increasing by 27 million of population every year. Such population influx is triggered both by rural-urban migration and natural population growth. What makes Africa's current process particular, when compared to other urbanising regions in the Global South is that socio-economic development lags much behind in relation to the speed of urbanisation. Urban management capacity remains at a rudimentary level and quite incapable of providing affordable basic infrastructure and creating adequate livelihood opportunities to the population. The result is the unstoppable expansion of informal settlements, characterised by precarious living conditions and imense poverty. Simultaneous to growing urban problems and facing the incapacity of urban administrations to provide shelter and basic urban services, urban dwellers resort to creatively engage in grassroots self-help informal organisations. Such self-help organisations function as means of resource mobilisation to cater basic services, enhance community capacity in dealing with socio-economic problems as well as in claiming otherwise undeliverable services and support for self-initiated local development projects from urban and national governments.
The panel hence examines: how such self-help informal organisations interact with formal urban management systems and influence the adverse effects of urbanisation; how far do self-help urban development initiatives change the constellation of actors in different levels of urban governance; how do the dynamics of national and international policy frameworks influence the role of self-help actors in building urban management capabilities in urban Africa.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Haruka Ono (Toyohashi University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
This paper clarifies land delivery systems in informal settlements in Nairobi. It was found out that pseudo-customary and pseudo-formal systems function together in delivering land and securing land tenure. These systems are closely related to the governance structure and site layout planning.
Paper long abstract:
In most African cities, informal settlements, which develop outside of governmentally controlled urban planning, meet mushrooming housing needs. Informal settlements are now a widespread phenomenon, reaching not only low-quality housing of poor and low-income people, but also detached houses and high-rise apartments of middle and high-income people. The purpose of this paper is to empirically clarify land delivery systems in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya.
The analysis showed that pseudo-customary and pseudo-formal systems function together in delivering land and securing land tenure. The former system is community-based and characterized by a series of procedures for delivering land and securing land tenure: occupation of land in a traditional manner; unplanned site layout; oral agreement on land transaction; and influential community leader on land and people that belong to the community. This indicates that the system derives from the customary land delivery process and mechanisms for securing land tenure under the authority of a traditional chief in rural areas. The latter system is characterized by a series of procedures for delivering land and securing land tenure: land subdivision by profit-oriented external group, or developer; planned site layout; written agreement on land transaction; and issuance of forms as a proof of land ownership. This indicates that the system refers to the modern land registration procedure and urban planning standards. Lastly, it was found out that these land-related systems are closely related to the governance structure and site layout planning.
Susana Neves Alves (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the challenges related to long term processes such as learning and capacity-building in highly volatile contexts faced by grassroots organisations involved in service provision.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the workings of the association that took over the management of the piped water supply system in a small secondary city in West Africa - Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau. Created after a city cleaning campaign with the aim of bringing together a number of people willing to continue working on similar initiatives, this association eventually took over the management of the city's water system. Without previous experience or knowledge, this association managed to build links with key actors - state and international NGOs - that helped the association to build its capacity to run the city's water system and to access funds required to refurbish and expand infrastructure. In this paper, I discuss this process in terms of the links between this association and a range of state and non-state actors and how this process transformed the ways in which key actors perceive service delivery in the national context. While such grassroot initiatives are highly adaptable and able to work in volatile conditions, they also struggle to mobilise resources and are highly susceptible to project funding cycles. This article argues that one key challenge is therefore to ensure that long processes related to learning and capacity building do not dissolve into nothing for lack of resources and the need of those involved to move somewhere else in order to make a living.
Eva Dick (German Development Institute)
Paper short abstract:
One of the main aims of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) UN member states agreed upon in December 2018 is to facilitate access to self-reliance vialocal integration. However, at the Horn of Africa, policies tend to disregard the vital role of refugee networks in facilitating urban integration.
Paper long abstract:
One of the main aims of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) UN member states agreed upon in December 2018 is to facilitate access to durable solutions beyond encampment. Moreover, the Compact pledges that refugees should gain access to opportunities and services and thus become self-reliant. Since most of the world's approximately 20 million refugees settle in cities and their urban-based networks tend to provide entry to urban (informal) housing and employment mar-kets, this constitutes part of a 'de facto' durable solution.
Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa - one of the major refugee producing and hosting regions in the world - the implications of changing humanitarian paradigms are not so clear. While the "Nairobi Framework for Durable Solutions for Somali Refugees and Reintegration of returnees in Somalia" translates the GCR to the regional context and its longest-lasting refugee crisis, the access of refu-gees to labour markets, services and infrastructure occurs to a quite limited degree and with few consideration of the role of self-help actors.
In the context of an ongoing three-year research funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, this paper assesses how global and regional refugee policies dif-fuse to national and local levels and their impact on local policy dynamics and constellations. Using the cases of Kenya and selected cities, the methodology involved document review, expert inter-views and observation. Significant political barriers at national level tend to forestall refugees' ur-ban integration and devolution of related responsibilities to local stakeholders, let alone to refu-gees' organisations.
Morten Lynge Madsen (Plan International Denmark)
Paper short abstract:
Grassroots play a critical role in supplementing lacking service provision in informal settlements but mismanaged urbanization is also a matter of poor data. The paper explores grassroots' role in urban knowledge production and the inherent power dynamics between grassroots and local authorities
Paper long abstract:
Urban growth continues, including in primary, secondary and tertiary cities in Africa. Cities are stretched beyond their limits in terms of providing basic services to their inhabitants, decent employment to their growing youth populations and a sense of security and safety.
This is not news, but despite greater attention to urban governance across a range of African cities, as well as at national and regional level, the gap between service provision needs and available services are widening in many informal settlements.
Based on quantitative and qualitative data from six cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, using a mixed methods approach, the paper explores the role of youth-led grassroots organisations in engaging with local authorities to ensure, as well as claim their rights to, basic social services in a time of chronic urban disruption.
Taking youth engagement in the Mukuru Informal Settlement in Nairobi as a case, the paper argues that the challenge goes beyond a simple deficit of resources vis-à-vis ever-increasing demand. Rather, the paper proposes to address grassroots involvement in participatory urban governance as a contestation over data, documentation and information - and essentially a question of power. Coordinated, systematic approaches to data generation on service provision, safety and demographic developments in informal urban settlements are often scarce, as are effective feedback mechanisms to ensure that information and data can be of use to citizens' participation in urban development and governance processes. How can young people claim and exercise their rights to information and participation in this context?