The number of people living in slums is set to double from 924 million by 2030. Improving the living conditions of slum dwellers and preventing new slums from emerging are daunting challenges. Success will largely depend on stimulating informal slum improvement by slum dwellers themselves and helping them to develop knowledge-sharing networks.

A paper from the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) notes that poor urban residents invest much more in their living environment than the public sector and donor agencies combined but their tremendous efforts and investments are largely overlooked. Many examples of successful slum upgrading remain little known and small scale.

An estimated 97 percent of the predicted growth in the world's population will take place in the towns and cities of developing countries and the international development target of improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 will only reach one in seventeen of these people.

Slums play important roles, absorbing new arrivals onto the labour market, providing accommodation for low-cost labour and a home for the informal sector of the economy. The social networks of the urban poor are an important starting point for slum improvement. They allow slum residents to pool resources, share information, and gain influence. While their own local knowledge is valuable, information from elsewhere is required to enable them to innovate. However, for most slum dwellers such knowledge is hard to access.

Amongst the key lessons learned from 30 years of formal slum upgrading projects are:

• Local participation is critical: communities need to have a say in the level of services they require.
• Services needs to be affordable to the community and to the local authority.
• Targetted subsidies may be required to include the poorest residents.
• Women need to be properly represented.
• Upgrading must have political support and be linked to livelihoods and income generation.
• Scaling up requires appropriate institutions, structures and regulatory frameworks.
• Security of tenure is a precondition for residents to invest in shelter improvements.

Poor people’s lack of information – whether about health, credit availability, their civic rights, livelihoods opportunities, training opportunities or municipal regulations – contributes to their insecurity and vulnerability.  ITDG defines some guiding principles for building bridges with grassroots organisations of people living in slums. It is important to:

• pressure municipal authorities to improve slums, not erase them
• recognise that slum dwellers themselves are the major actors in upgrading: others are there to facilitate and encourage, not to direct
• empower community-based organisations to articulate their needs to government authorities, banks or non-governmental organisations and hold them accountable
• ensure that traditional one-way forms of information exchange gives way to dialogue
• realise that peer exchanges and training are at the heart of successful replication
• understand that poor people have good reason to avoid risks: ways must be found to reduce risks though subsidised innovation and provision of detailed information.

Source(s):
‘Building bridges at the grassroots: scaling up through knowledge-sharing’, Background Workshop Paper, Intermediate Technology Development Group, by Theo Schilderman, August 2004 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 24 June 2005

Further Information:
Theo Schilderman
ITDG
The Schumacher Centre for Technology and Development
Bourton-on-Dunsmore
Rugby CV23 9QZ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1926 634400
Fax: +44 (0)1926 634401
Contact the contributor: theos@itdg.org.uk

Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), UK

Other related links:
'Addressing the challenge of slums'

'Can squatters be developers'

'Relocation or upgrading? Improving the welfare of slum dwellers'

'Can urban housing regulations be pro-poor?'

Linking housing and enterprise development: lessons from Kenya and India