Can bus transit cut poverty?

Mega-cities in South America and Africa have many slums that surround the inner-city. People within these slums often have to travel quite a distance to their jobs in more industrial parts of the city. To solve this problem, a few mega-cities have built fast bus systems to get the poor to their jobs at a low cost.

Critics however are questioning the effectiveness of these new transit systems. They have backed up their concerns with some studies showing that the bus lines benefit the middle class instead.

From this IPS story that we found at All Africa, writer Gail Jennings looks into this issue. 

Bus Rapid Transit, sometimes referred to as "rail on road" systems, are high-quality, high-capacity bus systems with their own right-of-way, dedicated bus lanes.

Today the TransMilenio in Bogota, Colombia carries around 1.6 million passengers every day, over 84 kilometres of segregated busway. In Curitiba, Brazil, about 70 percent of commuters use the BRT, and around 30 percent of passengers are "converted" private car users.

It is upon purportedly transformative systems such as these that the cities of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Cape Town in South Africa, Lagos in Nigeria and Nairobi in Kenya have pinned their transport hopes and dreams.

Early phases of multi-million dollar capital projects are operating in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and are set to soon launch in at least four other cities in South Africa.

But while it is too early to draw long-term conclusions about the impact of these transport systems, a number of researchers are asking questions and coming up with some answers about their ability to contribute to national goals of alleviating poverty.

James Chakwizira, a senior researcher in the built infrastructure department at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), told IPS that although these high-quality services do have great potential for addressing public transport challenges within communities, the current initiatives such as Johannesburg's three-year-old system, Rea Vaya, fall short of expectations.

He said because terminal infrastructure developments are located away from the marginal communities' location, people from these areas need to use a minimum of two transport modes in order to access and use the routes.

Providing cheap houses for slums might be an expensive idea

One way that social business has been succeeding is by providing inexpensive solutions for those in poverty. Products and services such as cheap heat, cheap stoves, cheap toilets and cheap fertilizer are some examples.

But what about cheap houses? Since so many poor people live in slums that only consist of shacks or tents, selling cheap housing to them would seem like a great social business.

An op-ed piece in the New York Times today warns against such a venture. Writers Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava from the Institute of Urbanology say that providing cheap housing for the poor could wipe out many jobs.

To start with, space is scarce. There is almost no room for new construction or ready-made houses. Most residents are renters, paying $20 to $100 a month for small apartments.

Those who own houses have far more equity in them than $300 — a typical home is worth at least $3,000. Many families have owned their houses for two or three generations, upgrading them as their incomes increase. With additions, these homes become what we call “tool houses,” acting as workshops, manufacturing units, warehouses and shops. They facilitate trade and production, and allow homeowners to improve their living standards over time.

None of this would be possible with a $300 house, which would have to be as standardized as possible to keep costs low. No number of add-ons would be able to match the flexibility of need-based construction.

In addition, construction is an important industry in neighborhoods like Dharavi. Much of the economy consists of hardware shops, carpenters, plumbers, concrete makers, masons, even real-estate agents. Importing pre-fabricated homes would put many people out of business, undercutting the very population the $300 house is intended to help.

Worst of all, companies involved in producing the house may end up supporting the clearance and demolition of well-established neighborhoods to make room for it. The resulting resettlement colonies, which are multiplying at the edges of cities like Delhi and Bangalore, may at first glance look like ideal markets for the new houses, but the dislocation destroys businesses and communities.

A tip on how to start helping

One of the great things that is happening in America today is that more young people want to help out and make change than ever before. But the biggest thing that is standing in their way is being unsure on how to begin.

In a guest essay at Nicholas Kristof's blog On The Ground, we learn of one skill that help young people get started. Writer Rye Barcott talks about the charity he started after spending time in the Kibera slum of Kenya.

I’ve seen the effects of this first hand on the faces of college students across the country. After one presentation, a student eagerly exclaimed, “I’m a doer and I just want to do something.”

Her statement implies the question: How? How do you make an impact in an environment that is equally empowering and overwhelming?

The answer, I believe, starts with an old-fashioned skill: Listening. Listening enables trust, and trust is the foundation of positive change. We need to slow down and listen more before doing. This was a lesson I learned as the co-founder of a non-governmental organization (ngo) in one of the largest slums in Africa – Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya – and carried with me to Iraq as a Marine.

Fourteen years ago the Marines gave me an ROTC scholarship to attend college. Assuming I would be involved in peacekeeping missions, I took classes to gain a better understanding of why ethnic violence happened. I studied basic anthropology and Swahili, then travelled one summer to Kibera to conduct research. There I rented a small shack in the community and started listening to young men my age as they spoke about their lives and ambitions. It wasn’t long before that I recognized a fundamental truth about the world: talent is universal; opportunity is not.

Two Kenyans and I later co-founded Carolina For Kibera to combine more opportunity with talent by investing in local leaders. We referred to our approach as “participatory development.” It’s a concept from anthropology that acknowledges that sustainable change must be driven from within communities. It can’t be imposed from the outside. I found this to be true in Kibera, where our organization now engages more than 50,000 people a year, and also in the Marines, where we continue to wrestle with how to build local capacity during counter-insurgencies.

A quarter of Mongolia's population live in one shantytown

The country of Mongolia now has a shanty town that contains a quarter of the country's population. People who used to live on the countryside move to slums of Ulan Bator to find work. Many of the people who move used to herd livestock, but growing desertification of the countryside has forced them to turn to the city for a livelihood.

From the Guardian, writer Kit Gillet describes the vast slum in Mongolia.

More than 700,000 people have crowded into the area in the past two decades. Many are ex-herders and their families whose livelihoods have been destroyed by bitter winters that can last more than half the year; many more are victims of desertification caused by global warming and overgrazing; the United Nations Development Programme estimates that up to 90% of the country is now fragile dryland.

Yet with limited education, few transferable job skills and often no official documents, most end up simply waiting, getting angry with the government and reminiscing about nomadic lives past. Many take to alcohol.

"More and more people arrive every year and there are so few jobs available," said Davaasambuu after queueing for 30 minutes to collect his family's daily drinking water from one of 500 water stations that dot the slum. "Nothing has changed in my neighbourhood since the last election [in May 2009]. There have been no new jobs or improvements. One little bridge has been added in the last four years, that's it," he said.

The basic infrastructure is not in place to support such a large population, which expands by tens of thousands of people a year. Many of them still live in a ger – the traditional round felt tent they arrived with from the countryside and which gives the districts their name and also their sense of impermanence.

Davaasambuu's is not an easy life. The area around his home is falling into disrepair with rubbish piling high. Nightly fights between drunks are getting worse. But at least he can take comfort in the fact that he now has a job with which to support his family, unlike many of his neighbours.

"Not everyone in the ger district is dirt poor – some are doing OK – but it is a hard life," said Troy Tvrdik, whose educational and vocational training NGO, Flourishing Future, is based in the district. "Even when it is minus 40, you still have to go out to get water."

A surge of malnutrition in Kenyan slums

Inflation in Kenya was at twelve percent for April, pushing the price of food and fuel out of range for many. The struggle to afford food is especially evident in the slums surrounding the city of Nairobi. NGOs are reporting a surge in children being admitted for malnutrition since the food prices increased.

From Reuters Alert Net, writer Katy Migiro talks about the struggle to keep fed that has only gotten worse in recent months.

Last year, international humanitarian organisation Concern Worldwide admitted 2,839 children with severe malnutrition into its therapeutic feeding programme, which covered six out of nine districts in Nairobi. Of those children, 64 died.

Another 3,400 children were diagnosed with moderate malnutrition, though lack of funding meant they were not given treatment. In the first three months of 2011, Concern admitted 1,021 severely malnourished children from eight Nairobi districts and identified moderate malnutrition in another 800.

Poor families spend most of their income on food. The price of potatoes has jumped 87 percent in the last year, while cooking fat and kerosene – which poor families use for cooking and lighting – is up 53 percent, according to the Kenyan government.

“There is no doubt that people in the urban slums are going to be the first to be affected (by) any small increase in food prices,” said Noreen Prendiville, head of the nutrition section at UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.

“This is an issue of extreme poverty.”

URBAN POOR OVERLOOKED

Odhiambo, 36, is a carpenter who earns 700 Kenya shillings ($8) a day when work is available. His family eat two small meals a day.

“Being that I have little money, I try to get what the children are required to eat but sometimes it is not enough,” said Odhiambo.

“If you don't have money, back at home is hell,” he said. “You don't feel comfortable coming home because you want to feed them but you can't.”

There are no comprehensive statistics on the number of malnourished children in Kenya's urban areas.

The World Health Organisation defines the nutritional situation as "critical" when 15 percent of children are malnourished, triggering a humanitarian response. With malnourishment in urban settings often overlooked, critics argue this definition needs to be revised.

Last year, 3,294 malnourished children living in rural Kajiado District were given emergency treatment because the rate of malnutrition was 11.5 percent, and drought had killed large numbers of livestock. But children living in Nairobi slums received no assistance as the malnutrition rate was an "acceptable" 3.5 percent.

Yet the total number of children at risk in the city was much higher. In Mathare, just one of Nairobi's 200-odd slums, a malnutrition rate of 3.5 percent translates into 2,961 children.

Video: High food prices dampen Easter mood

From NTV Kenya, a look at how Easter was celebrated in Kenya's slums.

Kenyan slum turns garbage into energy

In the slums of the under-developed world sanitation is a major problem. Garbage can pile up amongst the shacks because there is no way to dispose of it. There are very few toilets available so people have to go out in the open or into plastic bags that are just thrown out into the slum.

One community within the slum of Kiberia, Kenya has found a great solution to the problem. They have a community garbage burner that provides multiple benefits. It provides fuel to provide hot baths and can even cook meals. Some jobs are also provided for local youths to collect the garbage from the neighborhood.

From the IPS, writer Miriam Gathigah describes how the energy source cane into existence.

But when they presented their idea to Planning Systems Services Limited (PLANNING) - a group of international architects - to assist them in developing a design, their idea developed into a pilot project that has transformed the lives of many residents of Laini Saba village.

The architects proposed that instead of developing an incinerator that would only heat water for bathing, they could develop a community cooker where the locals pay a fixed fee to cook their food.

As fate would have it, the chairman of PLANNING, Jim Archer, had been developing a plan to address waste management in Africa and was determined to work together with the CBO.

"We therefore went back to the drawing board and bought 500 nylon sacks. We then approached the local chief with our idea and he helped us organise a meeting with the locals. During this meeting we communicated our intention to maintain cleanliness and also to build a community cooker," adds Asanya.

The sacks were distributed to the people with the instructions that once the sack was full the CBO, with the help of a group of young people would come by to collect the garbage in a wheelbarrow, immediately return the sack to the owner.

The garbage would then be deposited at the project site for sorting. "We don’t burn everything," Asanya says. "We sell some of the garbage as scrap and make money from it. Material that can be burnt is then channeled into the cooker and used to generate heat."

Video: Kenyan youth map their home

From Al Jazeera, a story on mapping the slums of Kenya. People in the slums hope that mapping out the most dangerous areas will help to provide more security.

Women in Kenyan slum use flying toilet to avoid rape

In the slums of Nairobi, Kenya the constant threat of rape and sexual violence have led some women to avoid using communal toilets. Instead, they are forced to use the very unsanitary practice of using flying toilets. They are called "flying toilets" because the bags full of excrement are often flung out of windows exposing the neighborhood to the contents within.

From Women News Network, we hear the story of one victim and details from Amnesty International report on the subject.

When darkness descends in the ubiquitous slums and ‘informal settlements’ surrounding Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, women who visit and use communal toilets unwittingly become sitting ducks.

The dangers are high, for women living in the slums, that they may become targets of youth gangs and individual male rapists.

“I had heard that it was unsafe to visit the (community) toilet alone,” said forty-two year old, Rebecca Nduku, a single mother of three, when she challenged her friend’s ‘I-told-you-so’ warning. Acting against advice, Rebecca suffered irrevocably for throwing caution to the wind.

“I reasoned that since it was only 7:30 p.m., and there were many people walking around, it would be safe to visit the toilet, which was located only about 100 meters away,” explained Nduku. “The moment I unlocked the toilet’s wooden door to walk back home I was dragged to an abandoned house where I was abused, in turns, by five men until I blacked out.”
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The July 2010 report, “Risking Rape to Reach a Toilet – Women’s Experiences in the Slums of Nairobi, Kenya,” by human rights organization, Amnesty International UK, offers a searing and detailed account on the lives of 130 Nairobi women who live in constant fear in the four largest slums surrounding the city.

In failing to include informal settlements and slums within mainstream urban planning, the City of Nairobi and the Ministry of Public Health has been faltering. In spite of social services and specific campaigns addressing safety challenges for women, successful programs remain a ‘mirage.’

“The continued exclusion of slums and informal settlements from the city’s planning processes, in particular the non-enforcement of existing sanitation standards, results in stark disparities in access to sanitation facilities between slums and informal settlement areas and other residential areas,” said Amnesty International after assessments were made on the continuing challenges and problems with sanitation and safety for women.

“Many women have suffered rape and other forms of violence as a result of attempting to walk to a toilet or latrine some distance from their home,” outlines the Amnesty report. “To avoid these dangers, women sometimes wash or use latrines in groups or ask male family members to accompany them at night. However, this does not alter the fact that facilities are inadequate and inaccessible.”
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In facing ongoing problems of violence against women, many women in the informal settlements and slums have improvised their own solutions toward safety. It involves avoiding community toilets completely.

The theory is simple. “Flying toilets,” bags that are used instead of bathroom facilities, are part of the answer to violence. But the often thin plastic bags come with many complications. They are extremely unsanitary. Once the bags are loaded with excrement, they are flung through windows eventually breaking open as they expose surrounding areas to numerous pathogens.

No water supply, no toilets, no rights, yet more people move into slums

People are moving into slums from the countryside all of the time, as many as six million people a year. But with some good planning, cities have managed to lower the proportion of slum dwellers from the total population. 33 percent of the world's urban population now live in slums compared to 40 percent in 1990. However, there are other cities that have continued to ignore the problem.

From CNN, writer Catriona Davies looks into how to best to improve the lives of slum dwellers.

A third of the urban population in developing regions lives in slums, according to U.N. Habitat, the United Nations department that focuses on urban development.

How to handle these makeshift settlements -- which often are overcrowded, lack adequate water supply and sanitation and whose residents' land rights are usually insecure -- is a challenge facing cities around the world.

Scroll over the interactive above to get a snapshot of slum populations in 14 countries around the world.

It's a problem that isn't going away. U.N. Habitat forecasts that the number of slum dwellers in the world will grow by 6 million a year and reach 889 million by 2020.

"First of all, city authorities need to acknowledge they have a slum problem and set targets for how to reduce it," said Eduardo Moreno, head of U.N. Habitat's Global Urban Observatory.

"Many cities automatically respond that they don't have slums or that they are very small, but data from U.N. Habitat shows it's more than the city authorities like to believe."

Moreno says governments need to invest heavily in reducing urban poverty and involve communities in their programs to improve slum conditions.
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China, for instance, has reduced the proportion of its urban population living in slums by a quarter since 2000 by offering tax breaks to developers who build affordable homes, according to U.N. Habitat.

"The government has gradually been demolishing these areas and building new homes for people to move into," said Yiyi Lu, an expert in Chinese politics and social development at London-based think tank Chatham House and a research fellow at the University of Nottingham.

There are still large numbers of migrants living in relatively cheap accommodation on the outskirts of cities, she said, "but it is proper accommodation with basic facilities and is not concentrated in large scale areas."

Reducing disaster impact in slums

From IRIN, a story on the work to reduce the impact of disasters in slums.

The disproportionately high risk of disaster faced by a billion slum-dwellers across the world could be significantly reduced with prudent investment, states a new report.

"We cannot stop urbanization but we shouldn't be naïve; a trend does not mean destiny, disasters can be prevented," Matthias Schmale, the Under-Secretary-General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said in Nairobi at the global launch of the 2010 edition of the World Disasters Report.

Schmale said solutions for disaster risk reduction and preparedness "need to be found in dialogue with the affected people; moving from the bottom upwards".

The World Disasters Report 2010 focuses on urban risk, with the IFRC warning that 2.57 billion urban dwellers living in low- and middle-income nations are vulnerable to unacceptable levels of risk fuelled by rapid urbanization, poor local governance, population growth, poor health services and a rising tide of urban violence.

The estimated one billion urban dwellers now living in crowded slums will rise to 1.4 billion by 2020, the report says, adding that Africa, which is often considered predominantly rural, "now has an urban population (412 million) larger than North America (286 million)".

"Urban is the new rural," Schmale said. "We know that it is better to give seeds than food... we should invest more in preparedness as shown by the recent disasters in Haiti and Chile where the magnitude was worse in Chile but the impact was worse in Haiti."

According to IFRC, urban poverty and disaster risk are often closely intertwined and the links between them will be increased by climate change.

"In any given year, more than 50,000 people can die as a result of earthquakes and 100 million can be affected by floods and the worst-affected are most often vulnerable city dwellers," IFRC said.

Leadership

James Kisia, deputy secretary-general of the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS), said there was a need to rethink the definition of social development.

"The average African man in a rural area will not live in a single room with his children but this is increasingly becoming the norm in informal settlements in urban areas; we seem to have left such social issues at the mercy of economic development," he said. "Leadership cannot be left to the government alone, we must partner together to create an enabling environment for social development."

Good urban governance is a recurring theme in the World Disasters Report 2010, with the IFRC stressing that it is essential to ensure that people are empowered and engaged in the development of their urban environment and are "not marginalized or left exposed to disasters, climate change, violence and ill health".

IFRC quoted David Satterthwaite, lead writer of the report and senior fellow at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), as saying: "The crisis of urban poverty, rapidly growing informal settlements and growing numbers of urban disasters arises from the failure of governments to adapt their institutions to urbanization.

"It stems also in part from the failure of aid agencies to help them [governments] to do so - most aid agencies have inadequate or no urban policies and have long been reluctant to support urban development at a sufficient scale."

Dhaka the fastest growing city in the world

From the PBS Newshour, a profile on the growth of Dhaka, Bangladesh the fastest growing city in the world. People move to Dhaka hoping to find jobs, but instead remain poor in the rapidly growing slums.

Sexual violence sweeping Kenya's slums

Amnesty International says that dangerous sexual violence is sweeping the slums of Nairobi. The women who live in the slums of Kenya's capital are in fear of using the communal toilets because they might get attacked.

From Reuters, writer Jeremy Clarke describes Amnesty's statement.

About 60 percent of Nairobi residents, or some 2 million people, live in shantytowns with limited access to water, sanitation and other vital services. Sewage runs though ditches and pathways are littered with garbage and human waste.

"Women and girls in Nairobi's slums live under the constant threat of sexual violence," Amnesty International said in a statement attached to its new report on Kenyan women in slums.

"Unable to leave their one-roomed houses after dark, many women in informal settlements resort to 'flying toilets' - using plastic bags thrown from the home to dispose of waste."

Amnesty International said these women were at high risk of communicable diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

The group criticised the slum's lack of police and the government's failure to enforce planning laws and regulations in the settlements.

"There is a huge gap between what the government commits to do, and what is going on in the slums everyday," said Godfrey Odongo, Amnesty International's east Africa researcher.

"My Home, My Life" housing program in Brazil

Brazil has begun an ambitious plan to give decent housing to all of the country's slum dwellers. The program called "My Home, My Life" subsidizes the cost of a new home for the homeless and those that live in slums.

The new housing will be built on the outskirts of major cities using private contractors. Brazil is starting with the slums that under threat of mudslides first. The "My Home, My Life" plan has drawn the attention of leaders from other countries who hope to replicate the housing program.

From this Associated Press article that we found at KSAW, writer Marco Sibaja tells us how the program works.

"This is undoubtedly a model that could be used in other countries," said Demostenes Moraes, director of Habitat-Brazil, the Brazilian branch of an international nonprofit devoted to building houses for the poor.

The program, started last year, is part of the social policies that have made President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva one of Brazil's most popular ever - and could help attract votes for his chosen successor, candidate Dilma Rousseff, who trails in the polls going into the October presidential election.
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Using federal, state and municipal funds, "My Home, My Life" pays 100 percent of the cost of a home for families who earn a maximum of $870 a month (1,530 reals) - three times the minimum monthly wage of $290 (510 reals.) The amount diminishes as participants' salaries rise.

Houses are built by private construction companies, which act as intermediaries with the bank on behalf of customers.

As of February, the government had 670,000 new-home applications in the works and aims to have signed contracts for 1 million homes by the end of this year, Ramos Coelho said,

A second phase of 2 million homes is planned to begin in 2011, she added.

If the program continues at the intended rate, Brazil could erase its shortage of 7 million homes - and hundreds of illegal settlements that have popped up over the years in the South American nation of 190 million people - in the next decade.

Video: Emergency cash transfers for those in Kenyan slums

This video from Concern Worldwide explains their program of emergency cash transfers for people in Kenyan slums.

Brazil condemns slum houses after rainy season

The recent rainy season in Brazil caused major flooding in the slums of Rio De Janero. The Brazilian government used the flooding as an opportunity to condemn some of the shacks within the slums. Poverty advices theorize it is the governments attempt to clean up the city before it hosts upcoming World Cups and Olympic games.

From the United Arab Emirates The National writer Sharmila Devi talks about the conflict the rainy season created.

A single colour determines the fate of thousands of residents in Rio de Janeiro’s shantytowns, or favelas, after floods killed about 230 people this month.

With a stroke of paint on the side of a shack or house, city officials assessing the damage from record rainfall are deciding who can stay and who must abandon their home. Blue paint means the house is still structurally sound; orange means there is cause for concern; black orders the residents to leave the house.

Although the floods had some effect on all of the city’s six million residents, the worst afflicted are among the one million or so people who dwell in the hillside favelas. They face the biggest hurdles to returning to what passed for normality in the poverty-stricken, drug gang-controlled slums.

The Brazilian government has rushed to try to take control after the floods, aware it is under increasing scrutiny as it prepares to host the football World Cup across the country in 2014 and the Olympics Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Officials issued reassuring statements, saying neither sporting event was likely to face such a disaster because neither would be held during Brazil’s rainy season.

But the floods have highlighted the country’s daunting challenges to upgrade its infrastructure, reduce widespread crime and overhaul a police force widely acknowledged as one of the most corrupt in the world.
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Flooding caused mudslides and exposed tree roots and fresh red earth in Rocinha’s steep, hillside streets and alleys. At other, even poorer favelas, long neglected by authorities, shacks and houses were swept away. Dozens of homes built on top of a rubbish dump crumbled down a hillside in Niteroi, a town just across the bay from Rio de Janeiro.

Wastewater has flowed down from the favelas to southern Rio, where the city’s elite live and play on the world-famous beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. Brazil’s economic inequality rate ranks among the highest in the world, with an estimated one per cent of the population owning 50 per cent of the wealth.

Eduardo Paes, Rio’s mayor, ordered nearly 50,000 people to evacuate the favelas. The city plans to spend more than one billion reals (Dh2bn) on relocation, reconstruction and reforestation.

Slums grow worldwide according to UN study

A new study from the United Nations finds a paradox in the number of people living in slums. China and India have been able to cut by a quarter the number of their people living in slums. Worldwide, the numbers are not so good, as slum-dwellers have grown by 55 million people.

From Reuters we find more statistics from the UN study.

The number of people living in shantytowns increased by 55 million to 827.6 million as population growth and migration from the countryside outstripped the effect of upward mobility in cities, the U.N.'s biennial report on cities found.

"The situation has improved over 10 years, but alas over the same period, the net increase of the urban poor is 55 million," Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of the U.N. Habitat program, said in Rio de Janeiro.

The Brazilian city will next week host the World Urban Forum, a five-day U.N. conference on the state of the world's cities, where more than half the global population now lives.

Some 227 million people escaped slum conditions from 2000 to 2010, meaning that countries easily surpassed their collective target under the U.N. Millennium Development target, the report said.

Tibaijuka played down the achievement of beating the Millennium goal of pulling 100 million people out of poverty, calling it "totally inadequate." The Millennium goals include cutting extreme poverty, reducing child mortality and fighting epidemics by 2015.

Barring "drastic" action, the number of slum dwellers in the world's cities is expected to grow by 6 million a year over the next decade to hit 889 million by 2020, the report said.

The struggle to stay well and fed in Kenya's slums

From IRIN, a story on the struggle of being HIV-positive and hungry while living in Kenya's slums. Not only so the sick have to keep themselves well, but they also have to fight to keep themselves fed.

Violet Tinah, 40, a resident of Korogocho slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is living with HIV and was recently diagnosed with tuberculosis, but her biggest problem today is not disease - but hunger.

"When I went for the results that informed me that I had TB, I was very hungry; I'd had no breakfast and lunch and could barely walk," she told IRIN/PlusNews. "I had to be supported and put in a wheelchair to collect the drugs.

"Often I go without food and during such times I feel dizzy and nauseous after swallowing the [TB and HIV] drugs," the formerly prosperous carpenter added. "Putting food on the table is like a dream."

On the day she spoke to IRIN/PlusNews, Tinah had had only a cup of black tea for breakfast and no lunch; a concerned neighbour has brought her some porridge "to help me swallow my drugs". Tinah was hoping her unemployed nephew would pass by later with a little food.

Many of the slum's residents live on food salvaged from a nearby rubbish dump and sold on the streets of Korogocho.

According to a 2009 World Bank poverty assessment, the poor in Kenya spend 70 percent of their income on food on average - those in the poorest 20 percent of the population spend 77 percent. Sharp increases in the price of staples in 2008 - maize flour rose by as much as 130 percent between 2008 and 2009 - and a national food crisis in 2009 mean poverty has been on the rise.

The urban poor, most of whom do not farm, have been particularly hard hit.

Korogocho location chief Rebecca Balongo told IRIN/PlusNews that many programmes supporting HIV-affected households had collapsed. "It is not unusual to have a family share only a plate of food in a day," he said.

Little help

The Kenya Network of Women with AIDS, which until 2009 provided food assistance to about 4,000 HIV-positive people in slums in central Kenya, has had to shut down its feeding programme due to lack of funding.

"We are no longer giving food at our drop-in centres in Korogocho, Kiambiu, Soweto and Mathare slums in Nairobi, Kiandutu slums in Thika and Kiawara slums in Nyeri town," said KENWA advocacy programme officer James Ndung'u.

"KENWA is only providing highly nutritious porridge to the very weak and bedridden clients.

"The slums have high HIV prevalence rates and without food there are challenges; our nurse has reported clients failing to collect ARVs on schedule - they say they are busy looking for work to buy food," he added. "ARVs require one to have a proper diet, but on an empty stomach, there is a tendency to default and consequent risk of drug resistance."

A few programmes continue to provide support in the form of food or cash transfers. Concern Worldwide has started a cash transfer programme in Korogocho to provide food subsidies of about US$20 per month to 2,000 extremely vulnerable households, including bed-ridden HIV-positive people.

However, Concern's programme is due to end in June, after which the government is expected to take it over. Slum residents and officials are not optimistic; chief Balongo says the government did not send any food support to her area in 2009.

Employment is scarce for the slum's residents, especially if they are weak. Frederick Egesa works as a watchman, earning about $47 a month. He walks to work, has no days off and is docked two-and-a-half days’ pay for every day he misses work.

"Look at my many dependents - I spend 1,000 shillings [$13] on rent and have 200 shillings [$2.60] daily for food, so we have to skip eating at times," he said. "When I collect my ARVs I am advised to eat well, but how do I manage a balanced diet?"

The PeePoo bag

Another new innovation in waste is being developed by a Swedish entrepreneur. It's called the PeePoo bag, a disposable, biodegradable bag that can be used to turn what is inside it into compost for fertilizing food crops. Anders Wilhelmson, a professor in Stockholm developed the "single-use" toilet after studying unsanitary conditions in the slums of under-developed countries.

From The New York Times, writer Sindya Bhanoo explains how Wilhelmson developed the idea.

In his research, he found that urban slums in Kenya, despite being densely populated, had open spaces where waste could be buried.

He also found that slum dwellers there collected their excrement in a plastic bag and disposed of it by flinging it, calling it a “flyaway toilet” or a “helicopter toilet.”

This inspired Mr. Wilhelmson to design the Peepoo, an environmentally friendly alternative that he is confident will turn a profit.

“People will say, ‘It’s valuable to me, but well priced,’ ” he said.

He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents — comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag.

In the developing world, an estimated 2.6 billion people, or about 40 percent of the earth’s population, do not have access to a toilet, according to United Nations figures.

It is a public health crisis: open defecation can contaminate drinking water, and an estimated 1.5 million children worldwide die yearly from diarrhea, largely because of poor sanitation and hygiene.

Slum residents combat negative media stories

Residents of one of the slums that surround the city of Buenos Aires got tired of how media only portrayed the bad of their lives. So they decided to combat the image with some media of their own.

Villa 1-11-14 produces their own magazine called Desde Adentro (From the Inside). The magazine contains articles about social services that are available to the residents. It also combats recent mainstream media stories of the village to give readers a perspective from the inside.

From the IPS, writer Marcela Valente describes this inventive media offering.

One of the magazine's sections is "El escrache" - "The Outing", a term coined for protests in which groups of hecklers go to the homes of people accused of human rights abuses and loudly denounce them.

"El escrache" chooses a news item or specific coverage by the media, and provides a response "from the inside."

One of the issues denounced journalist Facundo Pastor from the América TV station, which won a "best investigative report" prize at the prestigious New York Festivals for a report on Villa 1-11-14 titled "La favela argentina".

In the documentary, whose title refers to Brazil's "favelas" or shantytowns, Pastor lamented that this Buenos Aires slum lacks the picturesque hills, ocean view and "garotas" (young women) of Brazil's favelas, described Villa 1-11-14 as bleak, and said that to play a football game with a group of local kids, he had to put on a bullet-proof vest.

The journalist also said he agreed to the match to "break down the mistrust of the little narco-soldiers."

In "Desde Adentro", while local residents acknowledged that there are problems and difficulties among the most marginalised people in the neighbourhood, they complained about and refuted Pastor's discriminatory statements.

"Not everything here is peachy, but it's not that bad either," Alejandro Devita, another local involved in producing "Desde Adentro" told IPS. "We know better than anyone else about the bad parts, we don't ignore them. But the magazine can be an instrument to show other aspects, and to help people understand us better."