SDI to Launch Know Your City at WUF 7

SDI is getting ready for the seventh World Urban Forum (WUF) to be held in Medellin, Colombia from 5 - 11 April 2014.

As the largest and most widely attended conference on cities, World Urban Forum presents an excellent opportunity for SDI affiliates to present their work at the global scale, and network with key urban stakeholders - local and national governments, city officials, community organisations, international development organisations, academia, and more - in order to catalyse work on the ground. 

SDI will host a booth in the Exhibition Hall of the Plaza Mayor, where visitors are welcome to drop by to learn about our activities and catch up with delegations from SDI affiliates. 

This year, SDI will focus its WUF activities on the Know Your City Campaign, aimed at the development of protocols for cities to map slums across the city. Every household, every neighborhood and every informal settlement has to be counted. There can be no inclusive or equitable development planning and investment, nor effective city governance if the increasing majority of the residents of informal settlements remain unaccounted for. The campaign will be officially launched at our networking event, "Know Your City: Creating Resilient and Equitable Cities through Partnerships for Community-Collected Data," on Tuesday 8 April at 16:30 in the Yellow Pavilion, Room 11. 

Know Your City: Reflections from Kampala Learning Centre 

At the end of 2013, the Ugandan SDI Alliance began profiling and mapping slums in Kampala.  They identified 62 slum settlements and conducted profiling in each and every one in order to gather data on land tenure, services, housing, and livelihoods etc. This is the first time city-wide slum profiling has been conducted in Kampala and the opportunity for ACTogether and the federation to engage in the formulation and implementation of city plans is significant. 

As part of an effort by the city to improve sanitation access for the urban poor, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) recruited Fichtner Water and Transportation GMbH consultants to conduct a feasibility study on 20 urban poor parishes in Kampala. Thanks to lobbying and advocacy in 2013, ACTogether and the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda were invited to sit on the steering committee for the project – the only NGO/community representatives to do so. The international consultants were concerned by the lack of current information on slums. Official population data is 12 years old, gathered during the 2002 census, and it became clear to them that this had resulted in a serious underestimation of the present scale of slum coverage and a failure to understand the population shifts that have taken place as a result of eviction or displacement.

When ACTogether and the NSDFU presented their information from the city-wide profiling, the consultants immediately recognized its value. It was the first time the information gathered by Ugandan slum dwellers had been appreciated on such a highly technical and immediately practical level. The consultants requested we share our slums map so they could overlay it with maps from KCCA and NWSC in order to generate agreement on the extent of slum settlement and prioritize the areas of operation for the project. It was clear this was a concrete opportunity for the information the federation had gathered to influence planning for the whole city and target planned improvements to service delivery to the most vulnerable.

To read the whole article on this project, click here.