Does slum upgrading work?

A new colleague at OPM Ruhi Saith is a co-author of a new Cochrane systematic review on the impact of slum upgrading programmes on health and wellbeing (full summary here).

They find only 5 studies which can demonstrate any causality, from which they find:

• "Limited but consistent evidence to suggest that slum upgrading may reduce diarrhoea in slum dwellers and that slum dweller’s water related expenses may also be reduced
• Mixed results for whether slum upgrading can reduce parasitic infections, educational outcomes, financial poverty and unemployment outcomes
• Very little information on other health or social outcomes, or which types of interventions were most beneficial"

Which reminds me of two things,

first, John Snow and the 1854 Broad Street cholera epidemic, when John used a mixed methods approach based on KII*, and a pathbreaking geographic data visualization infographic** which founded the science of epidemiology using one of the first natural experiments.

second, that there is really weak evidence that area-based initiatives have any impact on employment and well-being in the UK, and so policy should target people not places. 

Which suggests that slum upgrading should focus on providing the public goods and infrastructure with clear evidence of impact and cost effectiveness - namely clean water and sanitation - and be more modest about expectations for impacts on other outcomes which are not primarily determined by the slum environment, such as poverty, unemployment, and low education.

*Key informant interviews. Or talking to people. Yes I am mocking your terminology, quals.

**A map. Yes you too, data monkeys.

Lenny Henry in Kibera

Four British celebrities try living and working in Kibera for a week on the £1-£2 average daily income (hattip: my mum).

Korogocho

I've spent most of this week wandering around Korogocho, Nairobi's third or fourth biggest slum (against recent FCO advice against "all but essential travel to low income areas of Nairobi, including all township or slum areas" - worth a few dangerzone street-cred points?). 

Korogocho is probably a bit poorer and a bit more dangerous than Kibera so I was advised against taking a camera, but it looks pretty similar to Duncan's photos of Kibera from this week. In fairness, someone did have a phone snatched literally opposite where we were sitting, and there was a stabbing on the same street a few nights ago. A local medical centre reported stabbings as the #1 source of admissions, followed by malaria and typhoid. 

I did sneak one photo from the safety of the NGO building we were based in. Remember those "amazing" sunlight powered water-bottle lights innovated for slums in Philippines that were all over the development blogs a few months ago? Rubbish. Everywhere in Korogocho just fits a square of transparent corrugated plastic into the corrugated iron roof. Much better. 

Lots of other interesting moments, but for now;

Best t-shirt slogan: “No Handouts, Just Empower me.”

Best blog on the neighbouring Kariobangi light industrial cluster where many Korogocho residents work.

What you can do to help: apparently uneaten plane meals from Kenyan Airways get dumped at the enormous dandora dumpsite adjacent to Korogocho, and end up in the market (including things like quite expensive Out of Africa brand Macadamia nuts). So the moral of the story: next time you fly Kenya airways, don't eat your plane meal and donate it to a poor slum dweller!

Census love

"In the absence of actual data (such as an official census), NGO staff make a back-of-envelope estimate in order to plan their projects; a postgraduate visiting the NGO staff tweaks that estimate for his thesis research; a journalist interviews the researcher and includes the estimate in a newspaper article; a UN officer reads the article and copies the estimate into her report; a television station picks up the report and the estimate becomes the headline; NGO staff see the television report and update their original estimate accordingly." (source: www.humanitarian.info) (via Map Kibera Project)

I honestly had no idea that Kibera is less than 200,000 people, and not over a million, despite the Kenyan census establishing this fact taking place 2 years ago. Via the Africa Research Institute