[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

NAIROBI, 4 June (IRIN) - To the estimated 700,000 people who live in Kibera, a sprawling shantytown in the south of the capital, Nairobi, lack of a functioning sanitation and drainage system is perhaps the greatest daily nightmare they must cope with.

Due to lack of most basic services, the residents of Kibera each day must, among other problems, endure the sight of filthy narrow alleys, and sludge and human waste from shallow latrines flowing into nearby streams, a situation that gets worse during the rainy seasons.

"One day an epidemic of disastrous proportions could break out in Kibera. Who knows what germs and toxins are present in the filthy water," Ofunya Johnnie, a 24-year-old Egerton University student and resident of Kibera, observed.

Kibera is said to be Africa's largest slum. "It has 3,000 persons per hectare; I do not see any other place in the world that has such a density," Alioune Badiane, the director of the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) regional office for Africa and the Arab States, situated in Nairobi, told IRIN.

But Kibera is just one of Nairobi's 199 slums. More than 1.6 million (of the city's estimated population of 3.5 million people) lived in these slums, James Mwangi, a Nairobi City Council planner, told IRIN. The slums were also sometimes referred to as "informal settlements", he said.

A colonial legacy

The slum problem in Nairobi is partly a legacy of the colonial policy of racial segregation, according to Badiane. "They [the colonial authorities] took the worst land and [areas of] bad settlements and assigned these to black people," he said.

During the colonial period, urban planning in Nairobi was based on government-sanctioned population segregation, which created separate enclaves for Africans, Asians and Europeans. The slums developed mainly because of unbalanced allocation of resources to housing and infrastructural needs of the separate sections.

"Unfortunately, that situation has not been addressed... Replanning the city to make sure that there is inclusivity in the concept of urban governance is not there. We have kept a segregated situation," Badiane said.

Kenya's post-independence period saw rapid population growth in Nairobi without corresponding housing provision, coupled with poor population resettlement due to new developments and extension of city boundaries to include areas that were previously rural, according to a UN-Habitat global report on human settlements published in 2003.

Attempts to upgrade Kibera

Last year, the government and UN-Habitat signed a memorandum of understanding under which the UN body would help the government formulate policy guidelines and seek funding for a slum upgrading project in Kibera.

But the project, which is still in its embryonic stage, has encountered opposition from various individuals and groups who benefit from the status quo, according to David Kithakye, a senior human settlements officer at UN-Habitat's regional office for Africa and the Arab States.

The upgrading project would entail the temporary relocation of slum dwellers to enable contractors to build better homes for them. But many are jittery over the project, including owners of shacks who rent them out to the slum dwellers, rent collectors, and even tenants afraid of losing their homes and charities and religious groups that collect money for the poor of Kibera, Kithakye said.

Some slum landlords, he added, owned as many as 1,000 shacks in Kibera, from which they were raking in considerable profits. "The situation [in Kibera] is so bad that it is actually an emergency. Any effort that is not going to address the situation as a disaster - an emergency - will not be addressing the issue," said Kithakye.

According to the UN-Habitat report, there is "a lack of a clear policy that would facilitate and guide urban development in Kenya, and urban interventions are largely made on ad hoc basis". "In the face of the failure to establish coherent and effective Nairobi-wide urban policies, the outlook for the situation in slums appears to be rather bleak," it added.

A glimmer of hope

But that could change. Both Badiane and Kithakye are optimistic that the problem of slums in Nairobi is finally being addressed, saying the government seemed committed to tackling it, with President Mwai Kibaki himself showing a personal interest in the progress of the Kibera upgrading project.

"Contrary to what was happening in the past when everybody was just keeping away, now, because of our involvement, because of the dedication we have shown, we as a UN organisation and bilateral and multi-lateral organisations living in this land of Kenya should come together in supporting efforts to create a platform of negotiation and helping the government of Kenya in making this story something of the past," said Badiane.

Mwangi acknowledged that authorities had in the past been undecided on what to do about the proliferation of slums. "Government for a very long time preferred demolition and eviction [from] all slum settlements. All slums were illegal... There was no provision of any services in the informal settlements," he said.

The demolitions, he added, did not deter the city's poor from rebuilding their humble dwellings over the years, and slums continued to mushroom. In 1996, the government and the city council decided to abandon the slum demolition option and, along with NGOs, formed the Nairobi Informal Settlements Coordinating Committee to work with the slum residents themselves to explore ways of providing basic services and upgrading the settlements.

Lawrence Mwangi, the Nairobi City Council director of environment, told IRIN that in 2000, a water distribution system was built within Kibera. The council had also provided street lighting in Korogocho, a shantytown in eastern Nairobi, in a bid to curb rampant crime.

"We have also packaged a project known as the Kibera Urban Environment and Sanitation Master Plan, which takes into account all aspects of the problem, and are looking into ways of implementing it," Mwangi added.

CBOs emerge

While the government and city authorities neglected the slum dwellers, community-based organisations (CBOs) emerged to fill the vacuum, helping residents to cope with the problem of perpetual lack of most basic amenities, including water, latrines and refuse collection facilities. Through these organisations, the residents hope to improve general conditions in their crowded, poverty-stricken neighbourhoods.

"We found that as our sanitation and water issues were a big problem, we decided to group together so that we could present a common voice to the government and NGOs," said Jason Lujesi, the chairman of a Kibera-based CBO known as MUUM by its Kiswahili acronym.

"We went to the government and raised the issue of sanitation, lack of schools, poverty, water, housing," Lugesi added. "But there was no response."

Later, some help came from the UN Children's Fund. The agency is supporting the residents of Makina and Kyanda locations in building pit latrines and buying water tanks. It has also provided them with implements for cleaning open sewers and a tractor equipped with a pump to drain latrines when they overflow.

Lujesi said sanitation had improved in the Makina area, but appealed for more materials to construct additional latrines. "Before, we had flying toilets," said Lujesi, using a euphemism for the habit of defecating into polythene bags and then throwing them into a nearby footpath or stream.

The flying toilets problem still persists in the Gatwikiri and Kisumu Ndogo areas of Kibera, according to Mariam Abdul, a co-director of a CBO called Stara Peace Women Group, which runs a school and a feeding programme for 250 pupils, 80 percent of them AIDS orphans.

"We have a toilet in the school, but people in the surrounding areas sometimes resort to the use of the flying toilets because they have nowhere to go [to relieve themselves]," Josephine Mumo, another Stara co-director, told IRIN. Stara is managed on funds provided by an individual donor in The Netherlands.

According to Mumo, lack of latrines and poor drainage leads to the swamping of entire neighbourhoods with dirty water during the rainy season. As a result, she added, there was a high incidence of diseases like typhoid, malaria and diarrhoea in the area.

Worse still, some residents have dug shallow pit latrines on the banks of a stream that runs through Kibera, resulting in human waste flowing into the already polluted Nairobi river. Downstream, women draw water to wash clothes from the same source.

Slums a global problem

According to UN-Habitat, nearly one billion people, or 32 percent of the world's urban population, live in slums. Blaming the problem on policy failure both at the national and local levels, it notes that the slums are characterised by lack of basic services, substandard housing or illegal and inadequate structures, overcrowding, unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations, and insecurity of tenure leading to irregular or informal settlements, poverty and social exclusion.

"The most important factor that limits progress in improving housing and living conditions of low-income groups in informal settlements and slums is the lack of genuine political will to address the issue in a fundamentally structured, sustainable and large-scale manner," UN-Habitat said.