Kisumu

Kisumu is Kenya’s third largest town. It is situated on the shores of Lake Victoria, bordering Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Around the lake, Kisumu is the leading commercial, industrial and fishing centre.

Fishing dominates the town’s view, with fishermen’s boats on the lake beaches, modern fish processing plants, informal drying sites, numerous fish markets and stalls. The fish industry has good economic potential but workers remain poor. In general over 30 percent of the population is unemployed.

Half of the population of Kisumu lives in absolute poverty and doesn’t manage to get enough food. Poverty is worse than in the capital Nairobi and other Kenyan cities, further deteriorating with rising prices of food and fuel.

Manyatta

Kisumu has three crowded slums, located within town. Over three hundred thousand people live closely packed together in miserable conditions, lacking the basic necessities of life. Urban Matters will focus on the neighbourhoods Manyatta A and B which are part of the slum belt. The total population of Manyatta is 86,000. Because of former upgrading schemes having been concentrated in Manyatta “A”, it is the relatively best developed slum of Kisumu. This means opportunities to create a model settlement, or to resolve problems related with a more advanced state of basic conditions, are within reach. The slightly better-of situation in Manyatta “A”, combined with the Lavidec Consortium plan to develop a model village in a sub-area of Manyatta “B”, can engender an oil slick effect on the whole of Manyatta and the neighbourhood of Nyalenda.

Challenges

Kisimu’s slums contain thousands of shacks, constructed of wood, plastic and iron sheeting roofs, without piped water, sewage and electricity. Community toilets and showers are scarce and unhygienic. Household waste is hardly collected because of the lack of a proper disposal site. Soil and ground water are polluted.

The unhygienic living conditions cause serious health problems. In addition, diseases like malaria, typhoid and diarrhea specifically cause children to die. Healthcare is insufficient and expensive. The hiv/aids pandemic remains the largest threat to health and society. One in three pregnant women in Kisumu are tested hiv positive.

Women are usually heads of households. Many are widowed, divorced or left by their husbands. Without any money to invest, they are limited to small-scale businesses and informal fish processing. Cynically, Kisumu suffers from a severe shortage of clean water, even though it adjoins Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world.

Opportunities

The cooperation between civil society organisations is relatively strong. They undertook various initiatives together after the riots in Kisumu in January of this year and want to continue this cooperation. Kisumu has been identified as one of the Millenium Cities, which creates opportunities to link the initiatives taken by the Millenium Cities Initiatives with Urban Matters.

Some of the opportunities that have been indicated by local organisations in Kisumu are:

• Setting up a sustainable system for processing and conversation of solid waste into economically useful products, using existing private (in)formal collection and conversation/recycling initiatives.
• Sewer system development, treatment and waste water recycling for irrigation, industrial and domestic use call for urgent additional support.
• Water hyacinth/water weeds management to remove and recycle this Lake Victoria “product” for commercial purposes.
• Investing in sustainable fishery, one of the main income sources of the people living in Manyatta;
• Investments in public transport. The lack of affordable public transport  influences the opportunities of the Manyatta citizens in different ways (considerable expenses on transport to/from work, not attractive to businesses).

Other opportunities are to be found in areas such as alternative water supply, development of play/training fields and urban agriculture.