Aid for Africa Development

Photograph

By: Antony Njuguna

Date: June 28, 2002

Source: © Reuters/Corbis.

About the Photographer: Antony Njuguna is a photographer with Reuters, a worldwide news agency. This photograph is part of the collection of the Corbis Corporation, headquartered in Seattle, with a worldwide archive of over seventy million images.

INTRODUCTION

Poverty is more severe in Africa than on any other continent. As of 2001, for example, 617 million people in sub-Saharan Africa survive on an average of seventy-five US cents per day. Increasingly, the poor of Africa live in vast slums built around large cities. This picture shows a lane in what is probably Kibera, Africa's largest slum. The area is home to between 500,000 and 750,000 people, one of 199 slums that surround Nairobi, Kenya's capital city. Forty-six percent of Nairobi's 3.5 million inhabitants—1.6 million people—live in slums, and forty-four percent of those live in Kibera. With about 3,000 people per hectare, Kibera may have the highest population density of any urban area in the world, according to Alioune Badiane, director of the U.N. Human Settlements Program. Most homes consist of a single room with dried mud walls, a mud floor, no windows, no toilet, no running water, no electricity, and a leaking roof. Nairobi's population is expected to double over the next twenty years.

One of the grimmest features of life in Kibera and other Nairobi slums can be seen in this photograph: the lack of any sanitation or drainage system. Human waste accumulates in the middle of every narrow lane and turns to a stew of sewage, garbage, and mud in the rainy season. In the Nairobi slum called Laina Saba, there were ten pit latrines for 40,000 people in 2002; about 4,000 would be appropriate for this many people. The open sewers breed malarial mosquitoes, typhoid, worm infestations, skin diseases, and other illnesses. Children brain-damaged from sniffing industrial solvents terrorize drivers that traverse the few passable roads through the slum by holding up handfuls of human excrement and threatening to throw them in the car if the driver does not give them money.

Incredibly, most of the structures in the slums are owned by landlords, almost sixty percent of whom are politicians or government officials. A 2001 statement by the Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi suggesting that slum landlords cut their rents in half led to major violence. When residents began to withhold rent, the police moved in, attacking homes and shops, stealing goods and money, beating residents, and allegedly raping residents.

Extreme immiserization of this kind, fairly common in sub-Saharan Africa, prompted African leaders to initiate an aid-and-development program in the early 2000s called the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). In June 2002, NEPAD was endorsed by the Group of Eight (G8): Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Russian Federation, who promised financial aid to Africa as part of their endorsement.

PRIMARY SOURCE

Aid for Africa Development

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

The slums of Nairobi are a legacy of historic discrimination. Kenya was ruled by the United Kingdom from the 1890s to the 1950s[LG1], during which time official policies allocated land separately to Africans, Asians, and Europeans, with Africans receiving the poorest parcels. Today's slums have developed directly from the old African enclaves, although they are vastly more populous. For decades, the Kenyan government's response to the slums has been to simply demolish blocks of dwellings occasionally and hope that their residents would somehow go away. Instead, having nowhere to go, the dwellers rebuilt. It was only in 1996 that the Kenyan government and the city council of Nairobi officially abandoned the demolition method in favor of working with foreign-based nongovernmental organizations to form the Nairobi Informal Settlements Coordinating Committee to provide basic services to the slums. However, in 2004 the government announced plans to demolish much of Kibera to construct a bypass highway, a move that would leave approximately 350,000 people homeless. Construction was still on hold as of early 2006.

NEPAD has been widely criticized as inadequate. For example, the 2002 G8 summit allocated only $1 billion for debt relief (cancellation of debts owed by African governments to foreign financial institutions and governments) for all of Africa—about the cost of a single space shuttle launch. The only initiative at the summit regarding water supplies—an increasingly critical problem—involved privatization, that is, transfer of control of water supplies to private, for-profit companies. Privatization makes access to water even harder for the poorest of the poor, who in Africa have little or no money. The G8 endorsement of NEPAD was widely praised by government officials of participating nations, but the president of Oxfam International, one of the world's largest anti-poverty charity groups, said that the G8 nations had in effect "turned their backs on Africa."

Other organizations are also trying to help Africa. For example, the U.N. Human Settlements Program, the U.N. Children's Fund, and several private groups are working to improve basic conditions in Kibera and the other slums of Nairobi. Goals include the construction of pit latrines and the provision of safe drinking water.

The construction of better housing is the only way to replace the slums themselves. However, there are obstacles. Nairobi slum landlords, about half of whom are government officials, sometimes own as many as 1,000 dwellings apiece and reap high profits; they therefore form a constituency which has a straightforward interest in the slums' continued existence. In Nairobi, across Africa, and indeed around the world, indifference to suffering combines with financial interest in the status quo to perpetuate inequity.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Web sites

BBC News. "Bypass Threat to Nairobi's Giant Slum." April 30, 2004. 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3671837.stm〉 (accessed April 12, 2006).

BBC News. "Nairobi Slum Life: Kibera's Children." Oct. 10, 2002. 〈http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2297265.stm〉 (accessed April 12, 2006).

United Nations Economic Partnership for Africa. UN Regional Consultations on NEPAD. "Summary Report of the first NEPAD Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue: Sandton, South Africa, 22-23 October, 2004.". 〈http://www.uneca.org/unregionalconsultations/documents/report_multistakeholder.htm〉 (accessed April 7, 2006).