A new kind of poverty

As the world's slum population explodes with great speed, Anna Ridout finds out what questions the aid community is asking and what it's doing about it.

There is a picture of poverty that is commonly summoned up by the media, politicians and charities when talking about the inequalities of the world and it features a mud hut, dry dusty earth and a great expanse of unfarmed land.

No wonder when the public is asked what poverty is, they mostly talk of rural Africa. This is due to a wide sweeping refusal by the majority involved in the fight against poverty to recognise the reality of the situation – a billion people are now living in urban poverty. It is likely to be three billion by 2050.

 

For one sixth of the living population, poverty means a crowded city slum with few or no services or resources and rampant disease.

Cities are expanding rapidly – and slums with them. Every year 70 million people move from rural to urban. Writer Stewart Brand and founder of The Whole Earth Catalog calls it the largest movement of humanity in history.

Sally Keeble, Labour backbencher and former Minister for the Department for International Development, has just returned from Mumbai (about half of its 16 million population are slum-dwellers) where she walked through a huge slum on the edge of the city. She was in India as part of an enquiry into globalisation and its impact on the economy. “Not everyone gets swept along by the positive effects of globalisation,” she said.

“Despite the rapid growth of Mumbai, the city is incapable of dealing with the great poverty and urban issues that come with it. There is a severe lack of infrastructure, with water and sanitation posing major challenges to civic and national authorities,” she continued.

David Kupp works for World Vision in urban research and development and is looking into how the organisation should be tackling the huge issue.

“We have to ask ourselves new questions and find new models of working,” David said. “Like many international NGOs, World Vision has traditionally been a rural organisation. We have some history working in cities, and wrestled with urban issues as far back as the 70s, but with the urban migration happening now there needs to be a new challenge set. 

“Urban development requires a shift in skill-sets and resources. World Vision is all about working with communities and so we have to a s k, what is community in an urban setting? City communities are defined around more than just neighbourhood. In a rural village people go to school or the temple together – but in a city, communities are fluid and dense. 

“How do you find the people to work with, if a workforce leaves the slum before nine and does not return until evening?” he asked.

“The economics of service provision do not work in a slum,” said David. “Water provision is lost in the sand. It’s simply too expensive to provide for so many people. We need to spend time building and empowering local community groups, rather than laying water pipes.”

"Organisations should be focussing more on mobilisation and strengthening of community organisations," said David.  "While service provision of basic necessities such as water is worthwhile, it is more effective to enable people to advocate with impact and hold their governments accountable for provision of water."

Sally agrees: “It’s very hard for NGOs to deal with these issues of urbanisation. They need better support and acknowledgement of the Millennium Development Goal on slum upgrading.”

Goal seven includes the “slum target” which aims to “have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers,” by 2020. Governments, including Sally’s, have promised to work towards this target.

And yet it seems that in 2006 the UK government are just starting to understand the issues of urbanisation. The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) claim that “not enough is known about practical and effective ways of addressing children’s interests within urban development. Their concerns are rarely taken into account in most planning decisions, community development projects or housing and neighborhood upgrading schemes.”

Despite such new challenges, World Vision's David Kupp explains how he is less happy today about drawing a distinction between rural and urban. “There is no rural anymore,” he said, “at least in the classic sense – the subsistence farmer is now in touch with the urban. In most places on earth, buses come and go every day, people are watching Dallas on TV in villages across Africa, mobile phones are everywhere. Every family has a son or brother working in the city. We have to make sense of the fact that a large part of many rural economies is made up of urban remittances from cities and even from abroad. Houses are being built in rural areas with money sent from the city.”
 
However UN-Habitat draws a distinction by reporting that slum dwellers in developing countries are as badly off if not worse off than their rural relatives. In its recent State of the World’s Cities 2006/7 it found that “in many sub-Saharan cities, children living in slums are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illnesses than rural children. Women living in slums are also more likely to contract HIV and AIDS than their rural counterparts.” 

Such traditional poverty indicators may have to be reassessed as it is becoming increasingly difficult to define urban poverty along rural lines. For example the well-known “dollar a day” guideline to poverty does not work as an accurate indicator when water costs two or three times as much in the city as it does in a village.

So it turns out the urban cannot be repainted so simply. While David Kupp is working on how exactly the aid community deals with the complexities, Sally Keeble saw that work is being done on the ground by World Vision.

“I visited projects in Mumbai that trained women in tailoring, helped organise home visitors for sufferers of HIV and AIDS and met a street theatre group who are raising awareness about the AIDS pandemic,” she said. 

“I gained a real understanding of the lives of home volunteers who work with people living with AIDS. Their houses were very very small, with a family of four living in two small cubicles – one for cooking and one for sleeping. There was no room for a bed in either. A group putting on street theatre was striking because the teenagers were tackling real taboos around HIV and AIDS – they were dealing with concepts that would challenge us in the UK.”
 
She admits that the UK Government needs to give higher priority to urban poverty and needs to provide expertise to developing countries to help work in this area. 

Globally David claims that this issue has “not hit the map within the international donor community the way it should have”. Strange when the global population, specifically the world’s poor, are choosing to grasp and grapple with the opportunities of the city over life in the village.

And who could argue when, as Stewart Brand points out in his article City Planet: “Squatter cities are vibrant. Each narrow street is one long bustling market of food stalls, bars, cafes, hair salons, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops of tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and pirated videos and music. What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by poverty but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can.”

Perhaps governments and humanitarian organisations just need to help them on their journey.