Making the Urban Poor Safer: Lessons from Nairobi and Mumbai

By Jean Pierre Tranchant

Nairobi and Mumbai are very good examples of highly unequal megacities. 40% of Nairobi's inhabitants and 60% of Mumbai are slum-dwellers; in Nairobi it is estimated that half of the people live on about 1% of the land area. Yet both cities are also very modern metropolises with plentiful opportunities to offer; are key engines of growth, and are poised to recieve even more people coming from rural areas or smaller towns.

Both cities are also affected by urban violence, including crime and (ethnic) riots. These different types of urban violence are inherently linked. In both Nairobi and Mumbai, neighbourhoods where riots or post-electoral violence occurred tend to have prevalent crime and gang activities rooted in poverty.

Research was done by IDS researchers in urban Maharashtra and IDS and CHRIPS researchers in Nairobi, which included the use of original data, the participation of key local actors, and extensive desk-based review, on how we can make the urban poor safer. A policy brief summarising the main lessons learned has now been published as well as two longer evidence reports for each case study

IDS Evidence Report 17 Addressing and Mitigating ViolenceUnemployment, Service Provision and Violence Reduction Policies in Urban Maharashtra
Jean Pierre Tranchant 2013

IDS Evidence Report 39 Addressing and Mitigating Violence
Missing the Point:Violence Reduction and Policy Misadventures in Nairobi’s Poor Neighbourhoods
Mutuma Ruteere, Patrick Mutahi, Becky Mitchell and Jeremy Lind November 2013 [1]

We draw some key lessons from the research:

1. Existence of a strong connection between vulnerability and violenceIn Nairobi and Mumbai, urban violence concentrates in the poorest areas where lack of employment, adequate housing and public goods, and individual and collective coping strategies are most acute. As a result of these vulnerabilities, criminal violence and protection provided through hybrid criminal organisations in Nairobi have become a way of life in the city’s poor neighbourhoods. Vigilante groups mushroomed from the late 1990s in response to worsening security in poor neighbourhoods and ineffectual, corrupt, or altogether absent policing of these areas. Original data in Mumbai and urban Maharashtra suggests that, even among  violence-prone areas, those where the lack of service provision and unemployment are most acute are also those most affected by episodes of violence. Within violence-prone areas, it is the most socially and economically vulnerable households who suffer most from disruptions caused by the presence of urban violence.
2. To tackle urban violence, policies must address the vulnerability-violence nexusPrevailing responses to violence and crime in Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods assume that there is a lack of law and order and that more robust policing and tougher laws can increase security. Police action in Maharashtra is also disconnected from development efforts, as seen in the absence of thinking on safety issues in the slum relocation and rehabilitation schemes. In urban Maharashtra, we found that concerns about crime and riots are second only to unemployment (pdf); and given that conventional development policies are bound to have effects on safety and crime, such a disjointed approach is unwelcome.There have been efforts such as the Safer Nairobi Initiative, which was endorsed by the Nairobi City Council, that aspire to a more coordinated effort to improve urban security by involving agencies and departments with mandates to deliver public services and create work opportunities. While these have had mixed outcomes, the spirit of such efforts to develop a joined-up approach is essential to improve security for the urban poor.
3. While top-down joined-up approach proves difficult to implement, community-led initiatives have had successSlum-dwellers routinely link up issues of urban vulnerability and safety. As a result, a number of community-led initiatives aimed at improving safety through vulnerability have emerged. In Nairobi, the GettoGreen initiative includes clearing public dumpsites and starting micro-enterprises for youths such as carwashes. The group’s chair explained, ‘If you are economically stable, your community will be stable. Having money prevents us from needing to steal or from being manipulated by politicians.’ (See this slideshow: How can providing access to basic services and economic opportunities improve security for people living in slums in Nairobi?). 
   
   In Mumbai, more formal initiatives such as the Slum Police Panchayats (SPP) and Mohalla Committees attempt to bring together slum dwellers and police to improve safety. The SPP consists of a long-term partnership between one community police officer and 10 representatives of slum-dwellers (seven women and three men). At the heart of the SPP is the idea that the social distance between slum-dwellers and police is too high and that the former have a wealth of local knowledge on the best ways to improve local safety that the police could benefit from.

To conclude, we found that there is a strong need to (i) generate data on violence in development processes; (ii) to learn from previous institutional efforts and (iii) to seriously engage and help evaluating current small-scale community initiatives that have the potential to link up effectively safety with issues of vulnerabilities, as well as linking vulnerable citizens with police and institutional actors. Concerted actions between citizens, state, builders and urban planners are unlikely to succeed if root causes of powerlessness and social distance are not tackled.

Notes

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[1] Interested readers can also the read the following policy briefing on our conceptual approach: Understanding and Tackling Violence Outside of Armed Conflict Settings

Economics: Part of problem, or part of the solution?

by Allister McGregor

Leonardo DiCaprio, are you part of the solution or part of the problem? The film, ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ is receiving very positive reviews: it portrays and caricatures the behaviour of ‘out of control’ capitalism. Apparently (I have not seen it yet) it does not overtly judge this behaviour and comically portrays the possible returns to a ruthless and unscrupulous pursuit of wealth that some still dream of. It’s a comedy and a caricature, but this is still essentially what many experts see as necessary for the continued growth of the global economy.

The global financial crisis that emerged in 2008 and its related financial and commodity price crises should have taught us some lessons. The fundamental lesson is that the economics that has for so long guided and shaped how we think about development has become profoundly misdirected and dysfunctional (Krugman 2009, Smith and Max-Neef 2011, Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012). A narrow and anti-social conception of economics that has focused on economic growth and profits, almost at any cost, is generating more problems that we can cope with globally. One of those problems is the persistence of debilitating and destructive poverty for many men, women and children in countries around the world.

Lest this be misunderstood, this is not a criticism of the insightful analysis or the many useful tools that economic science provides; it is a criticism of the way that economics and ideology have become fused at the level of policy and in public political narratives. This fusion provides a justification both for reckless profit-oriented public policy decisions and for individual behaviour that evidently produces damage to other human beings. This ideology is one that myopically champions individualistic gain as the driver of economic growth and relegates to secondary considerations the many problems that the underlying individualistic pursuit of profit produces. Thus, in this approach to economic development we must deal with environmental damage as a global side-effect; we must deal with persistent chronic poverty for some people around the world as a discrete technical problem; and we must cope with the increasing levels of social and individual damage that our development path is producing as if it had nothing much to do with the economic policies that have been promoted by the ideology.

But the problem is not solely ideological: a new kind of economics is also required. We need a global post-2015 anti-poverty initiative, but the nature of the post-2015 MDG settlement has the potential to be as much part of the problem as part of the solution. Or to be more precise the economics that we apply to the analysis of major global problems can be as much part of the problem as part of the solution. 

The post-2015 debates should provide a global opportunity for new thinking and new development measures. To achieve this however will require a rethinking of how economics is formulated and is applied to the analysis of major global development problems. The challenge, as implied by the Sarkozy Commission Report, is whether economics can be reoriented to focus on improvements in human wellbeing as the fundamental purpose of societal development and economic growth. To do so involves a major reconception of the relationship between economic behaviour and society and
this hinges around how we conceive of human wellbeing.

In a Working Paper released by IDS this week, myself and Nicky Pouw, a colleague from the University of Amsterdam, begin to explore what an economics of human wellbeing might look like. We argue that such an economics would shift to build on a social conception of human wellbeing and a shift away from an individualistic notion of wellbeing[1]. The problem for economics is to find modes of analysis that support us in meeting the challenges of living well together and away from legitimising the pursuit of living well as an individual. In ontological terms this involves a rejection of the pure methodological individualism that lies unquestioned at the heart of much popular economics.

Human beings are social animals and most of our major global problems - whether conflict and war, climate change and environmental degradation, poverty and inequality - represent failures to find ways to live well together. Currently, narrow and selfish economistic behaviour is a driver behind most of these problems, but we then expect ‘politics’ to solve the problems. This approach to politics and governance doesn't work. Rather an inclusive economics that focuses on the challenges of living well together must be seen as a necessary foundation for governance at all levels. In this formulation economic growth would undoubtedly be a feature of enabling some people in the world to live better than they do currently, but it must be growth that is designed in a way that meaningfully supports human wellbeing and which seeks to avoid damaging the wellbeing of others, either in the present or in the future.

In this sense the challenge to effective global governance for the coming decades is the challenge of finding ways of living well and sustainably together with others, from global to local levels. The reorientation of economics in a progressive and sustainable-post 2015 MDG settlement could make an important contribution to that effort to live well together.

References

• Deneulin, S. and McGregor, J.A. ‘The Capability Approach and the Politics of a Social Conception of Wellbeing’ European Journal of Social Theory 13(4), pp.501-519.
• Krugman, P (2009) ‘How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?’ New York Times, September 6th
• McGregor, J.A., Camfield, L. and Woodcock, A. (2009) ‘Needs, Wants and Goals: Wellbeing, Quality of Life and Public Policy.’ Applied Research in Quality of Life, Volume 4, Number 2, pp135-154.
• Saith, A. (2006) ‘From Universal Values to Millennium Development Goals: Lost in Translation’ Development and Change 37(6): 1167–1199.
• Sarkozy Commission Report (2009) Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
• Skidelsky, R. and Skidelsky, E. (2012) How Much Is Enough? The Love of Money, and the Case for a Good Life. Allen Lane; London.
• Smith, P.B. and Max-Neef, M (2011) Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good. Green Books: Dartington.

[1] See Deneulin and McGregor, 2010 and the Final Report of the Bellagio Initiative, 2012

Can any human being fail to be moved by the death of Nelson Mandela?

By Stephen Devereux

It is often said that we should not mourn the passing of an older person who has led a long and fulfilled life, especially if they were frail and ill towards the end, as ‘Madiba’ was. We cannot but celebrate the remarkable life, extraordinary achievements and above all the humanity of Nelson Mandela. At the same time we have to mourn the passing of greatness. The real sadness is our fear that there will be no more Nelson Mandelas, that he was the last iconic global leader. Truly, our world is diminished.

As a white South African, I want to celebrate Madiba’s life by making serious points through two jokes. 

Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison on 11 February 1990. The following month, on 21 March, Namibia achieved independence from South Africa. This joke was heard in Namibia around that time. Question: “What are those skid-marks on the road outside Windhoek?” Answer: “The 4x4s of the White South Africans who were fleeing to Namibia after Mandela was released, until they heard on their radios that Namibia was independent.”

If ever white paranoia about the transition to black rule in Africa was misplaced, it was in South Africa. White South Africans are better off now than ever – we have not made the sacrifices needed to close the gap between white privilege and black poverty. Mandela did not make us pay; he did not even make us apologise. By visiting the widow of Hendrik Verwoerd, the ‘architect of apartheid’ and the Prime Minister who imprisoned Mandela on Robben Island, he showed that he favoured reconciliation over revenge. We whites got off lightly.

I left South Africa in the 1980s, shortly before P.W. Botha declared a state of emergency, sent the army into townships to suppress civil unrest, and ordered the air force to attack ANC outposts in Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. For the first 10 years that I lived as a refugee in the UK, I was embarrassed about being a South African. Then in May 1994, I vividly recall watching Mandela’s presidential inauguration speech, when he declared: "Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. Let freedom reign." And I was liberated, along with millions of others. Since that day, I have been proud to be South African. Thank you, Madiba.

The South African cartoonist Zapiro famously satirised the evolution of humankind by depicting seven South African Prime Ministers and Presidents, 4 from the apartheid era – Verwoerd, Vorster, Botha, De Klerk – and 3 since the transition to democracy – Mandela, Mbeki, Zuma. The joke is that Mandela is the apotheosis of humankind; no-one can match him, before or after. He taught South African politicians how to lead with integrity, how to represent the entire ‘rainbow nation’, and how to leave office graciously.

Reproduced with kind permission from www.zapiro.com

The irony is that what made him stand so tall was his unique and seemingly totally genuine humility. If ever anyone practised the social justice principle of treating everyone with equal respect, wherever they are in social hierarchies, it was Madiba. The paradox is that Mandela’s towering goodness was only possible because he was the antithesis of apartheid, and its nemesis. He was as good as apartheid was evil. In the end, apartheid was defeated and democracy finally came to South Africa not via brute force and civil war, but via Madiba’s infectious smile and avuncular charm.

Finally, since not many obituaries will point this out, I should mention that the Centre for Social Protection, based at IDS, also has something to applaud Nelson Mandela for. In 1998, during Mandela’s term as president, South Africa introduced the Child Support Grant, which has since become the largest social protection programme in Africa, and is a model often showcased to social policymakers from countries across the world. South Africa might still be blighted by poverty, inequality and unemployment, but more than 11 million South African children and their families are demonstrably better off because of the Child Support Grant.

Thank you, Madiba.

Stephen Devereux is an IDS Fellow and Director of the Centre for Social Protection

Research to action: The Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI), Tanzania

By Fran Seballos, Tamlyn Munslow and Dolf te Lintelo

On November 14, Tanzanian dailies fronted with headlines estimating that 11.3 per cent of Tanzanians experience extreme (food) poverty. This coincided with an IDS presentation of results from the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI) to a group of Tanzanian members of the Parliamentary Group for Nutrition, Food Security and Children’s Rights, including two deputy ministers. This blog reflects on some key learning from our engagement with ‘hunger and nutrition champions’.

Co-construction enables greater access to decision-makers

Working in partnership with Save the Children and the Partnership for Nutrition in Tanzania (PANITA) – who supports the Parliamentary Group to act as ‘nutrition champions’ – IDS led the process of co-constructing a set of key findings with which to target the MPs. They married evidence from the HANCI secondary data and primary research conducted in Tanzania to critical issues in PANITA’s existing advocacy strategy and aligned them with ongoing efforts of the Parliamentary Group. As such key findings were first shared with, and approved by, the Chair of the Parliamentary Group to ensure their suitability for our audience.

Evidence-informed messages targeting political leaders

Where evidence allowed, we praised the Government of Tanzania for initiating key actions, notably establishing a National Nutrition Strategy; a coordinating mechanism which brings together stakeholders from across sectors; and having a separate budget line for nutrition. But - based on research undertaken with 40 Tanzanian experts - the first key finding stressed the need for improving the functionality of the coordination mechanism to better support the mainstreaming of nutrition into policies and strategies across sectors. Further evidence from the expert survey was used to highlight the lack of financial resources in the nutrition budget line which impacts on the realisation of policy objectives, particularly at the sub-national level. The third key finding noted that data on both nutrition outcomes and the quality of the delivery of policies and programmes was insufficiently available to usefully inform decision-makers.

While these findings produced affirmative nods from audience, Parliamentarians were surprised to hear that political party manifestoes (2010-2015) were seen to not adequately reflect hunger and nutrition as key development issues. Nevertheless, they quickly accepted that improving this could be a key political driver for greater action on hunger and nutrition in national government policy, laws and budget allocations.

Developing political ownership of findings and solutions

Presenting HANCI evidence on ‘problems’ and ‘why they matter’, and not prefabricating solutions successfully facilitated the MPs to themselves propose (and own) ‘solutions’, and translate these into personal action.

From solutions to action…

The MPs enthusiastically noted that HANCI evidence grounds complex nutrition issues and provides useful ammunition for them to exercise political leadership and strengthen their oversight over the Government. Specifically the MPs were keen to learn from the actions of other African countries that out-ranked Tanzania (8th) in the Index, in order to emulate and leapfrog them in future. Consequently, the MPs proposed several actions:

1. To take the lead in ensuring that nutrition is included as a key development issue in the next set of political manifestoes (2015-2020)
2. To champion nutrition in their regions and districts
3. Seeking to get the National Nutrition Strategy as a permanent agenda item in sub-national committees and council meetings
4. One MP committed to preparing a private motion for Parliament to demand regular and improved collation, access and use of nutrition outcome and policy implementation data at the district level throughout the country, thus enabling MPs to hold policy implementers better to account and to incentivise them to perform better.

All in all, the visit made a very promising start of what we hope will be an enduring relationship with Tanzanian decision-makers, to support them to foster greater political action on hunger and nutrition.

Is social protection an effective toolkit for addressing undernutrition?

by Stephen Devereux

On 13-15 November 2013 a preparatory technical meeting for next year’s ‘Joint FAO/WHO Second International Conference on Nutrition’ (ICN2) was held at FAO in Rome. One panel discussed the role of social protection in protecting and promoting nutrition. The discussion paper for the panel was presented by Harold Alderman of IFPRI, [1] and it included this policy recommendation, which sparked as lively a discussion as is possible in a meeting of 200+ delegates:

“Include nutrition outcomes as an explicit objective of social protection programmes, to promote improved nutrition”.

The discussion paper poses significant challenges to everyone who works on social protection, because many of us have invested much effort into trying to make a convincing argument for the effectiveness of social protection as a set of policy instruments, not only for addressing poverty and vulnerability but also for tackling food and nutrition insecurity. This paper, and the discussion at the ICN2 preparatory meeting, made me realise that we still have some work to do in making that convincing case, especially in terms of nutrition outcomes.

Several findings in the discussion paper suggest that we have too little evidence to give a definitive answer to the question about whether social protection does have significant positive impacts on nutrition status. This statement, about Ethiopia’s ‘Productive Safety Nets Programme’, could be generalised across many other social protection programmes.

“While the program has been successful in improving food security and asset accumulation, there is no evidence to date that this has translated into improved nutritional outcomes for children.”

We do know from impact evaluations that the Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP) reduced the annual ‘hunger gap’ by more than one month in participating households, from 3.6 to 2.3 months, between 2006 and 2010. [2] This is a significant positive impact on household food security, so why does it not translate into measurable impacts on children’s nutrition status? I can think of three plausible hypotheses.

1. Maybe it is because nutritional outcomes aren’t measured – but if not, why not? Surely this is one of the most robust and relevant indicators of social protection effectiveness? An important methodological point is that food security indicators, such as dietary diversity and the number of meals consumed per day, are quantifiable indicators but they are self-reported, so they are prone to all kinds of potential bias. Anthropometry is one of the few objectively measured indicators of food security outcomes, so shouldn’t it be included in rigorous impact evaluations whenever possible?
2. Is it because programme evaluators and administrators don’t want to monitor nutrition status, in case they find little evidence of nutritional impacts and their programme will be judged a failure, despite achieving success in terms of other indicators?
3. Or maybe it is because social protection should not even be expected to improve nutrition status? If one primary objective of social protection is to protect vulnerable people against downside risk, then stabilising food consumption through bad times is certainly a core social protection function, but raising food consumption sustainably is arguably more appropriate for poverty reduction and broader development policies.

Whatever the explanation, it is clear that the evidence base on causal linkages from social protection to reduced undernutrition is limited, and needs to be strengthened. This could certainly be achieved by insisting that nutrition is included as a direct objective of social protection programmes. But do we agree with the implication that nutrition outcomes should be included as an impact indicator for all social protection programmes? One contributor to the discussion at FAO pointed out that it depends on the objectives and design of each specific programme, but argued that the overall social protection system in each country should be oriented towards reducing undernutrition rates, as one fundamental indicator of wellbeing that social protection should seek to influence.

“It depends” is always a safe non-committal academic answer, but I tend to agree. Improvements in nutrition status should not necessarily be an indicator of success for each and every social protection programme, but social protection definitely needs to be an integral component of any integrated and systematic approach to reducing malnutrition.

Readings

[1] Alderman, H. (2013) Social Protection and Nutrition Discussion Paper, Preparatory Technical Meeting, Joint FAO/WHO Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2). Rome: FAO, 13-15 November.

[2] Guush Berhane, Hoddinott, J., Kumar, N. and Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse (2011) The Impact of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Nets and Household Asset Building Programme: 2006-2010. Washington DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.