by LIZ MCGINN
Two young girls carry water on the train tracks. Kibera Slum, Nairobi, Kenya. PHOTO/Taken by member of the St. Aloysius Gonzaga High School Journalism Club and used under a Creative Commons license.
Every year the BBC runs a huge televised fundraising event called Comic Relief. Its aim is to raise as much money as possible for worthwhile causes in the UK and Africa. The fundraising, undertaken by both ordinary people and celebrities, culminates in an evening television extravaganza featuring stories of both the fundraisers and the charities the event supports. This year’s event raised a staggering £17 million ($27 million USD).
One featured story was about four celebrities who went to live in the Kibera region of Nairobi, Kenya. They were expected to live with their hosts and experience their lives firsthand, with the proviso that the celebrities not interfere in any way. The people whose lives they shared included a self-employed, HIV-positive single mother of six; a sex worker whose children were being raised by relatives in order for her to earn money; and a family of six orphans being raised by their 16-year-old brother, living in a one-room shack adjacent to an overflowing communal toilet shared by at least 50 people. The celebrities were all deeply affected by the daily struggles for survival, and each walked away a changed person. In fact, they all disobeyed the rules and each helped the host they had been paired with.
As I watched this programme, I freely admit that I was moved to tears. It prompted me to find out more about Africa’s largest slum. Kibera is located about 3 miles southwest of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, and is similar in size to New York’s Central Park. The British originally founded it as a settlement for Nubian soldiers as a reward for their service after the First World War, although the land remained owned by the Kenyan government. Nowadays, Kibera is regarded as an “informal” settlement. In government terms this means that it does not officially exist and therefore does not need to be provided with services such as electricity, health care, running water, sewerage or schools.
Slums abound in Africa. In Nairobi alone, there are at least ten. Covering only 5 percent of the capital’s area, the slums are home for 2.5 million Kenyans, over half the city’s population. The United Nations Habitat organisation for the African continent estimates that worldwide one out of three city dwellers live in a slum. Their report States of the World Cities 2006/2007 claims, “the vast majority of slums – more than 90 per cent – are located in cities of the developing world.” They assert “UN-HABITAT projections indicate that the number of slum dwellers in the world will rise to 1.4 billion by 2020 if no remedial action is taken.”
Providing Nairobi with cheap labour seems to be the main reason that little is done for the residents of Kibera by the government. Kenya has a number of Export Processing Zones (EPZs), which are large industrial areas set up by the government to facilitate the mass production of export goods, mainly textiles for the international market.
Jennifer Miano, the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), claims that the major problem with EPZs is that they are “protected by government’s policies favouring foreign investors, thereby enabling factory owners to violate labour laws.” She claims that workers are expected to work extremely long hours with minimal breaks in harsh working conditions. KHRC reports that EPZs reflect the worst effects of globalisation, which, contrary to their objective of empowerment, end up becoming “factories for the manufacture of poverty.”
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