New apartment blocks are going up in Kibera under the government’s affordable housing programme – but an urban researcher writing in The Conversation argues the real test is not how many units get built, but whether the people already living there can afford to stay.
President William Ruto has shared video of the works, showing blocks rising alongside iron-sheet structures and new roads cutting through the settlement. The redevelopment sits inside a national programme targeting 200,000 units a year. Government figures cited in the article put completions at 8,367 units between September 2022 and March 2026, well short of that annual goal.
The programme is funded by a compulsory levy of 1.5 per cent of gross monthly pay, matched by employers, with the self-employed paying 1.5 per cent of gross income. Critics have questioned both the levy and whether the finished homes will be affordable to low-income households or allocated transparently.
The author, who has researched Nairobi’s informal settlements since 1996, writes that past upgrading schemes delivered real gains – sturdier housing, sanitation, roads, basic services – but also pushed rents and maintenance costs up to the point where intended beneficiaries sublet or moved out and better-off households took their place.
In Kibera, residents whose homes are marked for demolition want to know whether they will be counted as beneficiaries, whether they will get a unit and whether they can meet the running costs. The State Department for Housing and Urban Development has enumerated residents and issued Makao Bora cards as proof of registration, but how that converts into an actual allocation remains unclear.
The article also pushes back on the familiar description of Kibera. Claims that it holds a million people or is Africa’s largest slum have been challenged by census data and independent research; estimates generally put the population at roughly 170,000 to 200,000, depending on where the boundaries are drawn. It describes Kibera instead as a centrally located urban territory that supplies low-wage labour to the city, absorbs demand the formal housing market never met, hosts a dense network of micro-enterprises and carries real electoral weight.
Working out who legitimately qualifies for a new unit is the hard part, because residence, ownership and vulnerability do not line up. Long-term tenants may never have owned a structure, while some structure owners live elsewhere and collect rent. Under the Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme, begun in 2004, the 2016 allocation of 822 units in Soweto East Zone A used censuses, historical resident lists, document checks and field verification – and was still challenged in court, with the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights given oversight of the process.
Read the full story on The Conversation
Source: The Conversation
