Mathare, one of the largest marginal neighborhoods in the country, houses more than 500,000 people in five square kilometers, crowding and storing the human waste they produce in discovered streams. But when he said the visit later to the UN news, this was not the image he had left.
Without formal wastewater systems, streams in Mathare’s marginal neighborhoods in Nairobi have human waste.
What remembered more clearly was a group of boys and girls, dressed in uniforms of the Navy Blue School: girls with skirts and boys with pants, both with miniature ties under their vests, surrounded by human chickens and waste.
There was no formal school or funded by UNICEF near. But the community of Mathare had joined to create a school where their children could have the opportunity to break an intergenerational cycle of poverty and invisibility.
“That was a message for me that development should be located. There is something that is happening in the community. [level]”Mr. Jobin said.
Worldwide, more than one billion people live in overpopulated marginal neighborhoods or informal settlements with inadequate housing, which makes this one of the biggest development problems worldwide, but also one of the most recognized.
“The first place where the opportunity begins or denies is not an offices building or a school. It is in our homes,” said the UN Undersecretary, Amina Mohammed, a high -level meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
Fire test
Mr. Jobin was one of the experts who participated in the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) on sustainable development at the UN Headquarters in New York this month to discuss progress, or their lack of them, towards the 17 sustainable development goals (SDG) worldwide.
One of the objectives aspires to create sustainable cities and communities. However, with about three billion people who face an affordable housing crisis, this objective is not carried out.
“Housing has become a fire test of our social contract and a powerful measure of whether development is genuinely reaching people or if you avoid them in silence,” said Rola Dashti, general undersecretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (Escwa).
Housing as a mirror for inequalities
An apartment building in an informal settlement in Mumbai, India.
With more than 300 million people not made worldwide, it is sometimes easy to forget the one billion people who are housed but inappropriately. These people who populate informal marginal settlements and neighborhoods live in unstable homes and in communities where few services are provided.
“Housing reflects the inequalities that shape people’s daily lives. It is indicated who has access to stability, security and opportunity and who does not,” said Mrs. Dashti.
Children living in marginal neighborhoods or informal settlements have up to three times more likely to die before their fifth birthday. There are also 45 percent more atrophial than their peers as a result of poor nutrition.
Women and girls are more likely to experience gender violence. And human trafficking and child exploitation are also more frequent.
An intergenerational invisibility
People in informal settlements are often not part of the national census, according to Mr. Jobin, which means that they are not taken into account in social policies, social programs or budgets. Even if social protections are given, these settlements rarely have addresses in which families could receive cash transfers.
This is the reason why experts often say that people living in informal settlements and marginal neighborhoods are invisible in official data and programs.
“You are born from an invisible family, so you become invisible,” Jobin said. “You do not exist. They do not reflect you in policies or budgets.”
This invisibility makes it almost impossible to escape poverty.
“You become a prisoner of a vicious circle that entertains itself and then reproduces your child,” he said, referring to an inescapable cycle of deprivation.
The urban paradox
More and more people are migrating to urban centers, which leads to the growth of these informal settlements. And with its growth, more urgency comes to address problems.
The World Bank estimates that 1.2 million people every week move to cities, often seek the opportunities and resources they offer. But millions of people can never benefit, but forget the final notes in an urban paradox that portrays urban wealth as protection against poverty.
By 2050, the number of people living in informal settlements are expected to triple three billion, one of whom will be children. More than 90 percent of this growth will occur in Asia and Africa.
“These statistics are not just numbers: they represent families, they represent the entire workers and communities that are left behind,” said Anacláudia Rossbach, general undersecretary of the UN habitat that is working to make cities more sustainable.
The poor neighborhood of Mathare in Nairobi houses 500,000 people at 5 square kilometers.
Housing as a human right
It is not just national and local governments that fight to deal with informal settlements: organizations such as UNICEF are also “blind,” Jobin said, with respect to the scope of problems in informal settlements.
Development partners face twin problems in the design of interventions: there are not enough national data and informal governance, or lords of marginal neighborhoods, may be more critical to coordinate programs than traditional government partners.
“We know the problem … but we have not really been able to intervene,” he said.
Mrs. Mohammed emphasized that we must begin to see adequate and affordable homes as something more than the result of development, it is the basis on which the other other development must rest.
“The house is not simply a roof on the head. It is a fundamental human right and the base on which peace and stability itself rests.”
