By John Wafula
Basic sanitation or lack of it is a major challenge facing millions of Kenyans living in informal settlements. With at least 56 percent of Kenyans living in informal settlements, according to projections by the UN-Habitat, providing basic amenities to residents has become a key part of the ongoing national dialogue on inclusive and sustainable growth. These areas suffer from deficiencies in services and basic infrastructure that worsens pollution, poverty, and ill-health.
One of the biggest challenges in informal settlements is poor solid waste management. Past interventions to address the problem have had low success rates. For example, an experiment with dustbins in several settlements has not been successful due to vandalism, theft, and non-collection creating mini-dumpsites. This applies to other temporal collection points which are quickly converted into dumpsites due to the irregular collection.
The Kenya Informal
Settlements Improvement Project (KISIP), a -project of the Government of Kenya,
with support from the World Bank, the Swedish International Development
Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the Agence Française de Development (AFD) is a
key intervention whose objective is to improve living conditions of people
living in informal settlements by improving security of land tenure and
investing in infrastructure based on plans developed in consultation with
communities. You may be interested in…read
more>>
