"Touring" Kibera

Emily and I had the fortune of walking through Kibera today with my friend, Jackson Kago. Jackson works with UNHABITAT in their Safer Cities Program, where Nairobi is in the initial piloting phase. Two privileged white people walking through an all-black slum made for a disparate time, leaving no real answers about reconciliation or rehabilitation. And yet I was grateful for the challenging experience.

The policy of UNHABITAT is not to provide direct funding but to play a more advisory role in helping cities develop their infrastructure. Unfortunately, the population has grown faster than the planning. Already over half of Nairobi’s 3 million persons live in the slums, or former squatter communities that have established a permanent presence. People have been born, lived and died here. These communities are made of mud, wood and tin, and little hope holds them together.

We walked through one part of Kibera, called Soweto West after the infamous ghetto in Johannesburg, South Africa. I was surprised to see how orderly things were, with wooden structures forming a line along a straight dirt-packed street. There were even ditches for draining in some places and water lines to collection points.

Even so, life here is hard, with no city infrastructure to speak of. Many children walked around barefoot, playing amidst the filth and trash. People sell all kinds of odds and ends to make a living, often setting up shop wherever there’s an open spot. Most of the houses aren’t owned but rented out, not by the owner of land (technically the government) but by whoever got there first and built a structure for those who followed.

There is great innovation here. Kids play with toys made from discarded wire and rubber. Women lay out lint to dry in the sun, later to sell as stuffing for mattresses and pillows. Men set up “movie theaters” to show bootlegs of Bruce Lee.



Remnants of various projects lie amidst the rubble. A concrete bridge rises a good 10 feet above the “streets” it was supposed to connect. A faggot of pipes, disconnected from the mainline, are buried along the road, a failed (or still ongoing?) World Bank project. The only concrete building in sight is a seat of government, locked and heavily fortified.


If a project like safer cities is going to succeed, the program will need outside funding and inside backing. That is, it will need infrastructure from an outside funding source like the World Bank while also soliciting the support of the community. They have formed their own identity, and together they stand or together they go… even as each fights individually to survive on a day-to-day basis.

Jackson is well aware of the need for community approval and participation. Let us hope we can all work together for a safer, better tomorrow; if not for our sake, then for our children’s.